skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW: I have lived without a car for about three years. There are precious few sidewalks where I live. I considered getting a bike but decided that would be far worse than walking. At one point, I purchased a skateboard but failed to learn to use it. I leave for work on foot every morning and we do our shopping regularly on foot. Humans developed the ability to walk long before sidewalks were invented. They aren't really necessary, though, certainly, some terrain is more pedestrian-friendly than others.

If you are "unmotivated" and think it's hard, then it's possible you are already more unhealthy than you think: Lack of energy and mental focus for accomplishing goals is an early indicator of not really being well. And if you think eating healthier is too expensive, you should look into what it costs for medical care for a really serious chronic condition like diabetes. Google "diabetic ulcer". People get their feet amputated after these ulcers have eaten away flesh all the way to the bone. I guess having one or both feet amputated is a good reason to not walk anywhere. I would rather keep my feet though.

Giving up my car turned out to be wildly anti-climactic. The transition was really not that big a deal -- though I already lived close to work and shopping, so not everyone can just do it. But the first time I walked with my sons to the local grocery store, on the way back, my oldest said "That's IT?" He really thought it would be a lot longer walk than it was. My sons both prefer walking to being in a car. They get out more now than when we owned a car.

Peace.
That would be Common Lisp.

There was such a version of Smalltalk called Strongtalk, but it never got a community behind it.
OK. That makes sense. If O(1) is worst case, what could be better :)
C++ Cartesian Products
Very good point. I have seen the term "stopping out" used somewhere to distinguish this from "dropping out".
donated.

this hack opened a world of possibilities for my PS3 that Sony had closed with the removal of Linux.
When I was a sophomore in college, I knew I wanted to get into a startup as an intern. (I think there is a pg essay somewhere giving that advice, I followed it). I knew as a mechanical engineer with some software development experience I didn't want to be in one of the web 2.0 startups. I posted an Ask HN question about how to find startups in Manhattan (I lived in New Jersey, about 1.5 hour commute to manhattan each way). HNers posted two groups (NYTech Meetup, and TechNY?, forget the second one off teh top of my head). I sent an email out to those two groups basically saying, here is my resume, I would love to intern for a startup company, preferably one that does hardware, does anyone have any tips.

One of the members on the 2nd board told me about Bug Labs, and gave me the contact email for one of the guys there. I then went through about a 4 week process of playing phone and email tag. I never gave up. I'd get in touch about every 3-5 days and push for an interview. I finally got one, I think just so they'd shut me up. They really had no need/use/idea of what to do with an intern. But I think they knew I wanted it badly enough that it was worth taking a chance on me.

I ended up staying there for the rest of college doing 2 summer and 2 winter internships, and it was definitely the best experience/job I've ever had.

My suggestion is: figure out exactly what you want to do, find a contact in the company (for me it was HR not CEO) and just lay it out really clearly why you want to work for them and what you will do. For me I made it clear that I would pick up all the low priority tasks and free up the other engineers to do other things. That meant at first writing a lot of the manuals, testing, and writing tutorials. It was probably less programming than some other internships, but I was surrounded by some of the smartest people I've ever met, and it was a great place to work.

So just don't give up on contacting them, people in startups are busy, and make sure you make it clear what value you are going to bring to them becuase startups don't have the time or money to keep on interns that don't pull their weight.
I never understood this 'There can be only one' attitude. I'm fine with thousands of these sites existing. There doesn't have to be 1 that's better than all the rest, and I don't have to spend every waking moment finding it, or making sure I'm already using it.

Sites also don't have to be 'important' for them to matter to people.
There was a talk around where they were using two replacements at most(or two hash tables), and two hash functions. At insert time you add the object to the first hash table, if there is an object in the bucket, you then try with the second hash table. If you follow this approach a very large percentage of the buckets is going to be full. The remaining objects set (those that cannot be inserted in the first two hash tables because the buckets are full) is so small that you can keep them in a list or in a "standard" hash table. At some point I had a secondary storage implementation of this approach and it was good indeed.
IMO, I think Perl has had its time. It's time to move on. It was invented by Larry Wall to sort of have a unified language that minimizes retraining for a `sh` and `awk` programmer, that's why it keeps so many weird punctuations. These days, the thing that Perl is really good at - regular expression - is found in virtually every language that comes after it. It's had accomplished its historical mission, people have learned a great deal from it.

There was a time when there was nothing but Perl could solve effectively. That was in the 90s. We've had Moderm Perl dialects for a very long time now, they are called PHP, Ruby, and arguably, Python.
> I think you missed the point. It's a Mac app to downsize images

I got that. As has also been mentioned, the trademark is for other things as well.

Essentially, Apple's Retina display is a specific trademark. Unretina isn't billed as an app to downsize images. Rather, it's an app that downsizes Retina® images.

Essentially, their marketing is piggybacking on Apple's trademark.

> Also Apple were happy with the name for the first 6 weeks of the Mac App Store being open.

That's an awful assumption based on no evidence. That it was on the App Store only means that they hadn't yet decided to take action, or that those responsible for taking action hadn't decided they should.
Westboro “God Hates Fags” Church Versus Anonymous
I like it. The following todone definition will add a strikethrough to lines marked as done rather than deleting them (your terminal emulator must support the relevant control code to display it properly).

function todone() { sed -i -e "/$*/s/.*/\o033[9m&\o033[0m/" $TODO; }

edit: gnome-terminal supports this, but it seems xterm and putty do not
First, it's great to see such a wonderfully thought out article on the selling of programming tools to programmers. I've been doing this stuff for like 25 years now and I've seen a lot of fads and tools come and go.

I would like to try and not group TDD and BDD as similar things because in my eye they really aren't: they both provide very different approaches to solving a problem. If you were to simply cover TDD then I would agree with you that it is something that focuses on programming and the programmer and operates within that area of software engineering.

BDD, on the other hand, really has little to do with telling a programmer how to test their code or even how to program. About the only thing BDD "requires" a programmer to do is implement the Behavior described. There are a lot of ways to do this, but BDD adds a lot of other cool things too (like you can verify the requirements provided too).

So, when you mention that "The 'good' programmers all do things this certain way" and see BDD as a tool forcing that. Well, I don't think that is the case.

The funny thing is that BDD isn't even a new thing because it relies on scenarios. It is very similar to Use Cases with one minor, but important, difference: there was no standardization on Use Cases (Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn is a great book). Cockburn left the way scenarios are written open to the engineers whereas BDD provides a simple language, Gherkin, that can be used consistently across different tools (Cucumber, Behat, Specflow are a few examples).

So, from that aspect, this isn't some new "fad" that is being sold to developers. It is just a few changes to a well known tool: Use Case.
Both programmers' and artists' work can be reproduced at the twitch of a `cp -a`. You don't see those goddamn Ruby hipsters up in SF complaining about compensation.
OP here.

I've been fascinated by CPs for some time. In particular, efficient ways in which to generate them. So I placed my source code on github that demonstrates a few ways I've done it in the past. My hope is that others can offer suggestions and insight into different (especially faster) approaches to generate them.
Well on my screen the arrows go from the top of the line showing points and user name, to halfway down the first line of comment text.

Every comment has to have at least 1 line of text, why not make the arrows go from the top of the user line to the bottom of the first comment text line. That is about a 25% increase in size.
The issue of "reputation" is really interesting and my guess is that will be more and more important in the future. It is already important in specialized communities where it makes sense to be an expert or a master or a ninja or you name it or gain karma points.

But I am not sure how important can it be in communities with many many users and without a well defined focus. He refers to a few metrics for the social component but it is not clear yet what a good and appealing "reputation metric" could be.
let people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms.

StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back and it makes absolutely no fucking attempt to worm its way into my social graph.
Fat, salt and sugar make stuff taste 'good' because these were rare resources when humanity was young. This is the simple recipy of McDonalds and it is true for all food, including healthy stuff. If McDonalds were to use less fat and sugar they would have to use more delicate and more expensive ingredients to keep it yummie.

Sadly, many people care more for simple and cheap (i.e. fat and sugar) than delicate and healthy (i.e. unprocessed food). Even though every doctor, cook and common sense would advise otherwise.
You cannot draw graphics in a terminal window (he says, half-expecting to be corrected).

Your program can open up a window of its own and draw graphics in that.

Or you can do the low level thing on a different virtual console using Linux's framebuffer support (see the svgalib link octopus posted above) (as an aside, press Ctrl+Alt+F2, observe what happens, then Alt+F7 to return here).
Well, smaller constant factors could be better :)
Wow, what's wrong with changing opinions?
Motivation is far easier said than done. If it was so easy, than everybody would be doing it.

The market for wacky exercise machine, trainer, gyms, etc, are huge. Yet, we're seeing lot more fat people.

Maybe people aren't doing the whole motivation right. Lazy? Well, some of them are. A lot of people waste their time and procrastinate. A lot of people waste their money. A lot of people find it difficult to self-educate themselves.

Clearly, we're living in a world where human beings are not optimizing toward their best.

I am still trying to figure this out.
The phrase "To activate Wifi functionality on this device, a minimum 1 month data subscription is required." IS footnote 7, mentioned on the left side in the WiFi icon.
yes, I saw that. But adding a "free" option will generate loads of free crap apps, and only very few will actually pay for the service.
Check out the AppLoop case, which was the first service of this kind, but for the iphone: http://gigaom.com/apple/apploop-iphone-app-generator/ . I remember they had over 400 submissions in the first hours, and while they were shut down by Apple shortly it shows a good estimation of the kind of result this could have.
Exactly, it's a combination of betting big on market vision and component supplier management, and not as much about vertical integration. Case in point, "Apple secures 60% of global touch panel capacity, causing tight supply". Tight supply constrains iPad competitors price position with component suppliers.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20110216PD219.html
The strategy StackExchange is following is textbook. In fact, here it is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-Disruptive-Mainstream...

The network effect and the quality of contributors is everything. Start in an entirely new field and you'll end up with the blind leading the blind, and the quality and reputation of the site will plummet. Just take a look at That Other Q&A Site.

For a new field, the site needs enthusiastic and highly competent contributors; otherwise it will fail.
One trademark summary. Another: " Computers; computer hardware; computer displays; computer software; handheld mobile digital electronic devices used as a telephone, handheld computer, personal digital assistant, electronic organizer, and electronic notepad, and used to access the Internet, electronic mail, and other digital data" Serial Number: 85056807 - http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&state=401...

Same source as the story: http://www.trademarkia.com/retina-85056807.html
Uh, well there's a pretty huge difference between copyright cases in 1984 and copyright cases today: the DMCA. The DMCA is the law and (with few exceptions) it makes it criminal to circumvent DRM. Intent doesn't matter and whether or not you actually infringe copyright doesn't matter.

I think it's a bad law, but it is a law and geohot broke it. IANAL, but I would imagine the only defense would be to try to get the law itself overturned. I don't see how else he can get out from under it.

If you want to cite cases, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNetworks,_Inc._v._DVD_Copy_...
McDonald's has tried to do this, over and over again. People make the choice for the bad food over the healthy food, even when McDonald's offers both.
That is true. Here a similar solution for iOS:

a[href*=dir\=up] {-webkit-tap-highlight-color: green;}
a[href*=dir\=down] {-webkit-tap-highlight-color: red;}

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Lswpg.png
(setf * print-circle* t)
No, because I don't make misteaks.
Giving up my car turned out to be wildly anti-climactic. The transition was really not that big a deal -- though I already lived close to work and shopping, so not everyone can just do it. But the first time I walked with my sons to the local grocery store, on the way back, my oldest said "That's IT?" He really thought it would be a lot longer walk than it was. My sons both prefer walking to being in a car. They get out more now than when we owned a car.

It took me 20 miles to drive to school. I can't imagine walking there.

BTW, I love to walk.
In Praise of the Handshake
"stuff = stuff or []"

This idiom is baked into the perl community. It's kind of funny to see a Pythonista deciding it's a good idea. (You can tell it hurts him too).
Which is less bad, but still bad and doesn't change the fact that obesiety is a major problem that is growing rapidly.
It was pretty good for simple apps. But you cannot upload the apps created to Android market.
Uh, yeah, I quoted that exemption. But it is NOT an absolute right. If you jailbreak an iPhone for the purpose of e.g. using pirated apps (which I imagine many people are) then you are committing a crime even if you haven't pirated anything yet.
re: BigEye
The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (http://lcogt.net/) is building a network just like that, with slightly larger telescopes. It seems to be retirement project for Wayne Rosing, who used to be VP of Engineering at Google... in case you didn't see that in the LCOGT logo.
"The suburban landscape in which I choose live in,"

"Meanwhile, million of Americans chose to eliminate that option. They got a house mortgage to pay, family to take care of.."

Fixed that for you.

The only people who have no choice in this matter are the children forced to live in the suburbs, trapped by distance in their parents house, being taught terrible lifestyle habits from a young age.
"a natural outcropping of python's late binding, "names are references" variable model, and closure mechanisms, which provide a consistency to the language that is often crufted up in others"

My mileage varies.

I'd prefer default parameters to honor referential transparency, whatever hoops the runtime has to jump through to make this happen.
Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling.

The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictation". It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree (i.e. each level could have many immediate higher levels, so there's competition). I think there's something in this, mirroring the hierarchy in which human communities naturally organize themselves (karma/seniority works that way a bit here), but the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.
I'm skeptical of technological solutions. Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement. If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, all the external incentives are already aligned for you to make a positive contribution. Karma is a paltry substitute.

Another important feature of a private community is that you can share the kind of information that is normally only divulged over beers. This cannot be overestimated.

A private community doesn't have to be insular. In the example I mentioned in my original post, with every turn of the purge cycle around 15% of the members are kicked out due to inactivity and replaced with newcomers.
An analysis of EPUB3 (and, uh, a bit more)
Precisely because Python has late binding you would expect the parameters to be evaluated on each call to the function.

One thing Python lacks is the ability to use preceding arguments in defaults, e.g. you cannot do this:

def f(a=3, b=a+1):
return (a + b) / 2

NameError: name 'a' is not defined

Oops.
Is the number actually plummeting? Breaking into the traditional publishing industry (or the art-gallery scene) has always been notoriously difficult, which is why aspiring authors spent years mailing out manuscripts, publishing pieces in literary magazines for very small fees that weren't enough to live on, waiting tables while living in garrets, etc. And then even once you got published (a tiny minority of writers), you didn't necessarily get enough in advances and royalties to actually live on it unless you were in the top tier of sellable writers. It's possible it's even worse now, but I haven't seen figures.
I briefly liked Quora (partly because its the first site I've seen that serves up minified HTML). Now I find it boring, insular, and full of group think. Much like this article. And the valley. The concept that some non-valley site, that doesn't have all the cool kids behind it, might actually be successful is just not allowed within the techcrunch world-view.
What?

> And yet if you ask a hundred Apple fans why their
> competition is struggling you'll get a hundred different
> reasons.

I'm not an Apple "fan." Also, given that success is usually a fairly complex phenomenon, varied opinions are hardly surprising. Ask a hundred so-called "Apple haters" why the company "sucks" and you'll get even more incongruent answers.

> You seem to be claiming that planning ahead and buying
> in bulk to produce a cheap, boring looking, plastic
> tablet with a half-finished, linux-based phone OS and
> stylus interface would be enough to destroy the
> competition. Others would disagree.

I'm not claiming that, and I strongly doubt that I seem to. In fact, I'm simply defending the proposition that Apple's impeccable management of supply chains and inventory allows them to produce quality products at scale and reasonable price points. Yes, producing quality products (not cheap, boring plastic tablets) for 500$ is something that the competition can't do at this point. The stuff that is on par is more expensive (Xoom, Galaxy Tablet and so on); the stuff that is similarly priced or way cheaper (Notion Ink Adam, Archos) is very flimsy and immature.

The combination might destroy competition, including Apple, yes, but would definitely require sophisticated supply chain management. Right now, all relevant components are limited resources. What's so controversial about that?

> And not only do you credit this one factor with decisive victory

I don't (cf. difference between necessary and sufficient conditions).

> you're attributing it not to Apple as a corporation, but to one individual.

I don't. It's a fairly wide-spread habit to identify the work of a full department (operations) with its VP/head (COO Cook). Nothing wrong with that; reading it as "ZOMG TIM COOK IS DOING EVERYTHING WITHOUT HELP!!!!11" is naive at best. Of course, he relies on hundreds of engineers and administrators, but he's been successful in several companies so far and from what I've heard he is indeed a "hands-on" manager and workaholic.

Nothing fanboy-ish about that.

> Indeed, like the face of Jesus appearing in a grilled
> cheese sandwich, the only interesting aspect of this
> story is the way the believers react to it. The
> underlying reality is suspect, but no-one seems to care
> as long as it fits their narrative.

Oh, now you're just venting anger. Fair enough. Continue.
As I said: Not everyone can just do it. But you did not initially state "it's 20 miles to school". Your objections were things like lack of sidewalks, which I have found to be quite insignificant. Walking long stretches on pavement is actually quite hard on the feet and joints. My sons and I have endless criticisms of the "pedestrian highway" our city created. We have scathing things to say about most of their "improvements", which essentially turned a perfectly serviceable walking route into a bike path. Sigh.
Find and replace is probably the only time I use the command line to actually modify the code. I could use a text editor to do this but favour the power I get with the command line(using ack and sed). Using the command line isn't necessary to work with rails but it is favoured within the culture. Generally people use it for everything from running the server to checking code in and as mentioned, refactoring.