skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What this actually reveals is that this poster is used to code bases not advanced to the point of Don't Repeat Yourself. He may not even be at an advanced enough level to know about this idea or fully appreciate it. Python is powerful enough to get close to the ideal of Don't Repeat Yourself. Evidently, this poster has no clue."

You realize that this poster is Google employee #7, responsible for "Don't be evil" (along with Paul Buchheit), and wrote the first prototype for Google Instant back in 1999?

Something else to keep in mind, from the article:

"When I read debates online, I have a bias towards the people who view these things as tradeoffs and a bias against the people who say there's only one right answer and everyone else is stupid or clueless ... When you're in a debate, consider that the other person might not be stupid, and there might be good reasons for his or her choices."
It's funny how it's not optimized at all. "E" and "T" are both incredibly hard to type; this would give you RSI problems in no time.
I understand, but seeing someone's eyes is crucial for some levels of communication/trust. So while I don't think your choice is 'douchbaggy', a version without sunglasses would probably get better responses, and better communicate your passion/competence.
Botched the link, sorry: http://www.newsweek.com/2004/02/01/ok-mac-make-a-wish.html
This cannot be stated often enough: SO reputation is worthless for assessing fitness for hire.

Lots of short, google-able answers to trivial questions will get you much more points than thoughtful answers to hard questions.

SO can be useful for preliminary screening, but only if you look at the actual answers.
A lot of people don't like popup windows, due to the their abuse years back. That also led to browsers and security software blocking them a lot of the time.
> On a related note, Mac OS X can already create password-protected encrypted disk images with a few clicks in Disk Utility.

There's a major annoyance with these. The dialog that accepts the password does not support paste. You actually have to type the password. I don't even want to know my password--that's the job of a password manager.

I've been using TrueCrypt instead.
If you find this interesting, Chouinard's story of the history of patagonia, "Let my people go surfing," is a quick and interesting read on how he built patagonia, while trying to stick to his beliefs about the environment.
I concur, but the value of such a law will not be apparent to anyone who doesn't feel the same way about transparent pants and unencrypted email.

I should also add that I think it's evil to take advantage of the user ignorance of the issue to improve ad targeting.
On Windows, Minefield nightly does it in normal mode. In full-screen mode you don't see any ui element at all.
By the way, "Tabs on Top" is an option accessible by main context menu. You can enable/disable it just like menubar and bookmarks toolbar.
What Mz said. I'm doing this living-without-a-car experiment as well, and it's one of the best things I've ever done. Like Mz, I just walk, and take public transportation, and don't use a bike.

It's great walking around, getting more exercise, talking to neighbors, noticing the weather and the landscape and people's gardens.

Oddly, after my last full-time gig ended, and I was "doing nothing," it seemed at first that I needed a car. To do nothing! The fuller realization of how much money, fuel, and environmental damage is caused by (often unnecessary activity in) the standard car-owning American lifestyle deepened my commitment to mindful choices in all aspects of how I live.
What would be the appropriate usage of lightboxes? I really can't think of any besides the Facebook's "Before you submit."
Dropbox also lets you go back and open past versions of all your files, meaning that anything in your Dropbox is effectively backed up as well.
You bring up a great point. For this reason, I really hope Google makes improvements for his. It would be great to have a notification area on or right near the tab that alerts you to possible phishing attempts.
> Lisp seems to be optimized for writing code; Python seems to be optimized for reading it.

Urgh... A hundred times no. I really do appreciate that the author seems to have given Lisp a try. But this is simply wrong.

Why does Lisp provide macros? Because they make code easier to read. I say stop focusing on what language abstraction (f x) represents and focus on figuring out what the code is doing.

Oh well, at least he didn't complain about lisp having too many parenthesis.
Software is too important to leave it to programmers
It is worth noting that this is from 2006.

Also, he missed the main problem with Scheme (and Lisp) IMHO: language fracturing. Want to use Scheme on your project? Not so fast! Which one? PLT Scheme? Chicken? MIT? DrRacket? Gambit? TinyScheme?

...the list goes on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Scheme_implementations

Most of these are 95% interchangeable in terms of code, but there are a few differences here and there that make it hard (especially for newbies) to get help from Schemers using a different flavor.
Ask HN: any known production use for Sinatra(rb)
I'm in Proof of Concept in order to use Sinatra in production, and be happy to get some feedbacks and tricks in production use (e.g. performance, scalability, etc.)
JQuery Browser Detection Feature Isn’t Useful for IE8/9
sorry, meant "maximized". Full-screen is a bit different, yes.

I don't know that I've seen the "tabs on top" preference... they're always on the top, with plugins doing side-tabs. I'll look for it some time though.
Prior art?

2009 - http://www.randomwire.com/storing-sensitive-data-in-the-clou...

2008 - http://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/truecrypt-virtual-enc...
The screenshots look fantastic, but don't forget to check out the reviews before you buy: folks are disappointed that the game runs choppily on iPad, and amounts to an interactive movie rather than a game. Props for voice acting, though.
The blue icon to the top left shows that this is Minefield[1] (codename for nightly builds of Firefox). Also, it has a dropdown arrow, showing that this is probably using the Hide Menu Bar[2] addon. The lack of usual menubar/chrome of the browser can be explained by the use of Awesomewm[3] or dwm[4]. Firefox 4+ builds all have the same tabbing as in the screenshot. Also, the bookmarks toolbar has been dragged to the same line as the addressbar and all bookmarks and bookmark folders have no name, thus only showing their favicons, which is the default behavior. Also, the grandparent comment has apparently moved the status bar to the top, on the same level of the tabs. This is new to me, and maybe the default behavior in current nightly builds of Firefox.

If I may be so bold, I'd wager this author is using Arch Linux, since awesomewm is very popular with that group of users, and because of the rolling-release cycle nature of Arch, resulting in the latest builds of Firefox.

[1]: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minefield/

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hide-menubar-...

[3]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/

[4]: http://dwm.suckless.org/
I find this easier:
about:flags
Safari already does this. You can reduce the Safari UI to just a window and a title bar; the location bar will appear automatically when you hit Command+L or open a tab, and disappear automatically when you hit Return.
"insertion".
// Here be gryphons and scabrous wyrms
You realize that this poster is Google employee #7, responsible for "Don't be evil" (along with Paul Buchheit), and wrote the first prototype for Google Instant back in 1999?

Why, are you arguing from authority on his behalf? In that case, I say he should know better! (That's a stand worth burning some karma on!)

tl;dr - If you are going to criticize language X, first take the time to learn the best practices of language X. If you don't, you're just creating more clueless noise of a kind which already exists online by the ton. Also, it seems quite lazy. All you have to do is get on IRC and ask, "Hey, I've been playing around with X. What about when this happens?" You might even learn something this way.

EDIT: Google employee #7? Makes me wonder if dozens of Google programmers have said something like, "Arrrgh, why did he have to name it that!? Did Amit write that code?"
In A Cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating
Dumb qn: What are window decorations?
Interesting. It's known that viruses and transducing phages can incorporate host DNA into their genomes.

And of course, going the opposite direction at a metalevel, one theory of the origin of eukaryotic mitochondria is that it is of bacterial origin (an idea proposed by, among others, Lynn Margulis, who was married to Carl Sagan)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory

...and leads to the following provocative idea: "According to Margulis and Dorion Sagan, 'Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking' (i.e., by cooperation).

All life is a tapestry.
When I finally made the switch from a 4:3 panel to something widescreen, I had to find some that were 16:10.
They're blocked automatically when untrusted application tries to open them not in direct response to user interaction. If you open one from <a> tag, I don't think any browser will try to block that.
In order for us to have simple languages they need to be created from low-level ones.

I also think C++ is too complicated, but it's an amazing powerful language, if you master c++ you can pretty much master any language out there.
If "clever" is often necessary to avoid things like conflating concerns or introducing dependencies, I think this points us in the direction we need to take in improving programming languages.

I agree!!!! As a rough rule of thumb, "horizontal" or "general purpose" libraries are a potential source of inspiration for language improvements.

In my own case, I think #andand is a terrible kludge. But if I were designing a new programming language, one question I would ask myself is, "How do I make this go away?"

I might add support for monads, Or maybe I would decide that null is a bad idea. I don't know, but I would certainly give it some thought.
The plan of having every single website in the world get its own elastic IP address is just downright silly, and is totally untenable in a universe where IPv4 is depleted and we still don't have IPv6. This isn't just a limitation of S3, or even of other Amazon products like CloudFront or Elastic Load Balancer: this same limitation exists when you graduate to "big boy" status and start messing with things like Akamai.

Look: the technology was designed in a certain way, and in this ecosystem (which you can't fix) you need to have a www. on your hostname. People need to learn to deal with this, and to get over their arbitrary hatred for "www." (a string that user studies, for the record, show really helps normal end users understand that this weird thing they are looking at is actually something they can type into a web browser).
The real HTML5 boilerplate
I'm actually learning C and I see it a lot in the book examples regarding macros(#define ....)
No, I'm arguing against the ad hominem that forms the second half of your original post.

The first half of your post was great. It addresses the arguments directly, and I completely agree. In the second half, you then go on to make assumptions about the programmer's experience and aptitude - assumptions that I've shown are quite false. If you want to debate the merits of an argument, debate the merits of an argument, don't assume that everyone who argues with you is stupid. There's a very good chance that they aren't, and then you look like a fool.

Edit: On a regular basis, I whine about Craig Silverstein or Jeff Dean or Marissa Mayer's code. "Why did s/he have to write it like that? It's cost us untold thousands of hours in coding around their nasty hacks and poor design decisions." However, I recognize the context they were operating in: they were a tiny startup of about 20 people, trying to organize the world's information. They were working basically round the clock, and they changed the world. Sometimes, building something that works for users and won't crash your datacenter is worth the price of maintainability. You have to survive before you have the luxury of hiring people that will call you stupid.

Tradeoffs. They come with every hard problem.
That's not a hack. It's an algorithm.
Drop a note to help@twilio.com, and we'll add you to the beta as soon as possible.
الشيخ الروحاني لجلب الحبيب 0096171556230
الشيخ الروحاني لجلب الحبيب 0096171556230
You actually can get decent output quality from Word. It is just that Word becomes inefficient when this is a concern. Indesign is not really aimed at authors, but is for people who want to turn edited copy into publishable proofs.

Open Office exists as part of a free Java-based ecosystem. I couldn't say it is used in any serious publication workflows, but the components are there. Context is aimed at serious publishers, and has strong roots in educational (i.e., not academic) publishing.

Apples vs. oranges: the point of this subthread has been that I thought your statement But the underlying toolchain and language are past their expiration date. By far. and backing this up by talking about how hard "easy" things can be that turn out to not to be trivialities anywhere. Latex is not for casual users, but it is very much not past its expiration date for authors who are serious about typesetting. I'm not making excuses for Latex, nor am I unfairly bashing the alternatives.
Google Revamps Native Client
Nice tutorial on tying these pieces together!

Title is misleading. Heroku is genuinely $0.00, but after the trial period Twilio goes to $1/month (for the phone number reservation) and $0.01/minute for voice calls. A bit like saying "Big-Screen TV at Best Buy for $0.00", because, after all, you can return it for a refund within 30 days.

@korussian: Tropo is a nearly identical service that offers local numbers in 40 other countries. See their FAQ:
https://www.tropo.com/docs/scripting/faq.htm
They will also host basic scripts on their own site (Python/PHP/Javascript/Ruby), so you can do without Heroku altogether. And the best part is, they cost three times as much ($3/month + $0.03/minute)!
Frenchie here. Résumé is written with two "é". Otherwise it's a typo (e != é).

In french, résumé literally means "summary", and it's anything but a synonym for CV. I'm not sure how it ended up being a borrowed word used that way in US english.
My comment wasn't against Indian developers it was targeted at the idea of outsourcing, my appologies to anyone who viewed it that way. For what it's worth my comment would have applied to any country/culture.
I agree with you, but I don't think it's a big issue. What Sony is doing is stupid. If I can help stop that, awesome.
I also know that a large number of people are just waiting till iPhone 5 in the summer to get the phone on verizon.
Stop that, it's very silly: http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/
Thanks! Sorry for rediscovering the wheel :)
The uprising in egypt was relatively peaceful. The media spotlight was on and Mubarak may have restrained from using force to save his own skin. Comparing the two because Egypt also shut down the internet is natural, but Mubarak is not Qaddafi. Even if the internet shut down is ineffective at quashing dissent, it seems unlikely that Libya's path will be at all similar to Egypt.
Chrome is my primary browser, and while I applaud increasing space devoted to content, I wish Chrome had better support for alternate search engines. My primary searches are (in order of use) Google, Wikipedia, Amazon. By better support I mean I don't like the way it works in the omni-box. I think the old-fashioned way done in IE8 and FF of having a dedicated search box is much more convenient and easier for most users to configure, but I'm open to other alternatives. I understand IE9 has jumped on the bandwagon and dropped the search box too.

[EDIT] My biggest beef: remembering to substitute underscore for space in Wikipedia search terms.
I'm not sure how it ended up being a borrowed word used that way in US english.

Then you probably don't want to know what we did with your word for "shower".*

English is just weird like that, I think.

* Which is the same as the word for "shower" in German. I have some good stories from my childhood about such misunderstandings...
I'm using in production in more than a couple of places, mostly for back-end heavy apps (ie: not much UI). Works fairly well with Passenger in my cases.
Shakespeare was an individual (not a nebulous, anonymous,
amorphous collective)

Not that it matters concerning the point you make, but that may not be the best example, as the question of whether Shakespeare was an individual genius is a matter of some serious, although somewhat fringe, debate [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question
Great idea. I tried to do a <sub> and it looked funny, and adding a full &nbsp; was too wide. Maybe I'll play with a smaller space character.
The worst part about lightboxes is that when you click the back button like you've been doing for the past 15 years, you get really pissed off.
Yeah, exactly. He just enumerated the binary representation. A=1, B=2, C=3...

Maybe I should build a Dvorak-ish version of this...
Poll: Have you ever voted in a poll?
I recently had a problem with their account management as well: SE forgot who I am, and created a new account for my e-mail address. I then recovered my original account, and ended up being logged in as different users (with identical credentials) on the normal site and the meta site.

I do think the no-login approach is exactly right, but their implementation seems a little buggy.
Don't Loop, Iterate
Isn't keyboard-related RSI caused by moving wrists? This system doesn't require you to move your hand at all.

BTW. I've just read on Wikipedia that there's no causation proven between RSI/CTS and keyboard typing. Interesting, as from what I've seen, it's a widespread belief.
Incidentally, the original NCSA Mosaic browser had no URL bar. In its place was a drop-down list containing the browse history. To type a URL you would select "Open URL" from the menu, or hit Command+U.

Likewise, early versions of Netscape also hid the URL bar by default, and used Command+L to present a URL dialog box (behavior that's still present in Firefox today, when the URL bar is hidden).
UC Davis scientists race to develop airport scanner for Homeland Security
HTML history pushState should fix that.
I found it very hard to do this with my left hand. Especially since the first bit is so widely used and my pinky on that side is pretty weak.

I guess you can tell that I'm not an emacs user :)
Python itself is pretty "clever" compared to many other languages (GC, lack of obvious 1:1 correspondance between code written and code executed, dynamic typing, significant indentation, decorators, generators, etc.). If Python programmers were really opposed to cleverness, they'd be writing in straightforward assembly or a very thin veneer over it.
It doesn't punish, it draws moderator attention (though too many flags on an article before N upvotes kills it, IIRC).
I prefer lightbox implementations that extend a standard hyperlink to the enlarged image. If you middle-click, ctrl-click, etc, your browser grabs the URL from href and opens it in a new tab/window. The script is initiated by an event attached using a framework like jQuery, which uses a DOM query to locate links with a specific class. This has the additional upside of working as expected for users with JavaScript disabled. The implementations that fail miserably either use 'javascript:methodCall()' inside href, or have a kludgy onclick implementation.

Built properly, a lightbox shouldn't get in the way of your desired behavior.
It reminded me of Shades from the one hit Wonders in That Thing You Do.
I think there is a very crucial similarity: there are signs that the military is refusing to shoot their own people. It's why ultimately the revolution in Egypt worked.
indeed if you tune in to twitter channel #lybia you can hear a lot about shootings. Tweets say that there are ~500 shot people in Lybia.

Disclaimer: I don't use twitter, but I don't know of any other real time source of info.
Unfortunately the protesters will pay the price. I'm not sure there is anything the rest of the world can do to help, or at least the US, because foreign military force delegitimizes any home grown revolution. When the group in power are willing to use deadly force the protesters won't be able to win based on numbers only. If Egypt's military had crushed the protesters I doubt it would have turned out the same way.
"Oh well, at least he didn't complain about lisp having too many parenthesis."

Humans are visual creatures. It really is easy to get lost in Lisp's parentheses.

Languages whose blocks are easier to identify at a glance really are easier to read.

The attitude of far too many Lisp developers seems to be that Lisp has failed to dominate after all these many decades because people are just too stupid to realize how great Lisp is.

If Lisp hasn't dominated by now, rather than arrogance and superiority, it would be better to think about why Lisp continues to fail to dominate.

By the way, I'm not suggesting you're one of those people.
Hey,

I'm the author of couchfuse, I didn't have couchapps in mind but I am developing snippetapp which is one.
Right now the mounted documents don't include the design docs so it won't do for couchapps, I am planning to add support for this later on,

Sorry for the accent ;)
Not so. As I commented earlier[1], SO's data/ink ratio sucks compared to YC.

1- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305304
Ad hominem is disqualifying an argument based on attacks to the one making it. The comment you refer to is drawing (perhaps wrong) conclusions about the author of the OP from what he says. Warranted or not, it's not fallacious.
I just posted a comment on the blog, but given that it is "awaiting moderation" and for all I know won't post (and I like using HN to keep track of my comments a lot more anyway), I'm cross-posting it here:

--------------------------------

“”"I get everything that Twitter offers, but with multiple layers of benefits that a Twitter user doesn’t even understand they are not getting.”"”

^ And, to be clear, normal end users don’t understand that they are not getting these benefits not because they don’t realize that’s possible, but because they don’t actually consider these to be benefits.

I mean, I’m right there with you: I refuse to use services like Gmail, and self host my own e-mail. I DO NOT trust Google, and often find myself wanting to do subtle things that Google doesn’t really support.

(I mean, e-mail is great and decentralized and all, and you can buffer the pain by using your own hostnames that you can switch off to other providers, but in the mean time they still are indexing all of your e-mail for marketing purposes and unless you are constantly backing it up /have your data/, which is scary.)

Although, looking at your MX records (which are all google.com/googlemail.com) I see that even your need for privacy and self-hosting only go so far, and you /are/ willing to trust Google… so uhh… yeah. ;P

But most people, even me, stop caring at some point. I do /not/ purchase bandwidth to my office to run my own internally administered servers anymore, for example. And, for most people, using Gmail or Twitter or anything else is “just fine”.

As for how Twitter treats their “users”, UberTwitter is not their user, and that understanding that they, in fact, did not “cut off” any users: they disabled a single client that doesn’t seem to understand that calling their product “UberTwitter” was downright egregious.
I can't type G for the life of me. Maybe it has to do with the number of simultaneous keypresses on my keyboard?
I don't know about that. Say what you want about Emacs (personally I'm not a huge fan) it does a pretty good job at syntax highlighting and auto-formatting Lisp source. I never had problems with reading well-written Lisp code in Emacs.