skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- One of those stand/sit desks

- Quiet.

- No funny looks if I want to work from 5am - 3pm

Prefer table tennis to foosball. Would rather have a "music room" instead of either, but that's a bit much to ask for.
This reminds me of the transition to SaaS. (Gaas??)

Soon game devs can develop their games for idealized virtual environments which is much easier than developing for a video game console (or more than one console). If a dev needs features that a console doesn't provide, they can just 'host' it on a different data center.

The slow release cycle of consoles that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are basing their businesses on is about to be obsoleted and replaced with frequent software updates.

From here, it's only a small step to conceiving a world in which it is incredibly easy to build multiplayer games, too. If the whole simulation lives on the server and nowhere else, then you don't need any network code.

The OnLive team must be incredibly excited!
You can do that quite cleanly in Python:

import commands
print commands.getoutput("your system call and args")
It sounds like you're saying "government is the problem". But nearly every other developed country doesn't have this problem.

Please, explain why government is the reason for why the US healthcare system is so much poorer than the healthcare system of countries in which there is far more government involvement.

Other countries show us that solution to bad government isn't the elimination of government. The solution is to fix what we've got.
Sumatra is a good application choice for safety, but be aware - the printing support is either really bad or non functional depending on the document.
RIM's got two nice advantages to it:

(1) Employers often pay for the BB, and the data plan. You're getting access to a lot of users who wouldn't otherwise be customers in the smartphone arena.

(2) As the phones are already part of the business's primary operations, you have some nice opportunities to sell apps that integrate with the business.

Considering that RIM's product isn't even out the door yet, and the specific strengths RIM holds, it's not 100% comparable to the iOS & Android side. You've got the chance to provide something that isn't a (a) fart app; (b) casual game; (c) train schedule; or (d) local wrapper for the website.

Frankly, the superficial weaknesses of the form fillout and download procedure just aren't substantial. That's what, half a day? The next few months are gonna be in the APIs, and the next few years are gonna be in the customer base, app market, maintenance, and support of the app.
yep. we've been doing this for five years, as we've grown from 3 people to 20. haven't had an issue yet. work with people you like and trust - everything else will follow smoothly.
> at least two orders of magnitude low.

You're saying there are 100,000 general practitioners in the US? Even that number may be low, as this WSJ article says the US has "352,908 primary-care doctors". The article also says there are around 954,000 total doctors in the US.
Are you sure that's Perl? Are you sure it's not... nothing?

Seriously, I cannot fathom why this would work, let alone how. The syntax is completely alien to me.
More on the HBGary Federal Breach Revelations
a great suggestion and one that i should seriously consider; however my undergraduate major was psychology and i basically minored in math, and other than core biology and cancer i didn't take any bio courses. so i'm not sure of the best way to pursue an advanced biology degree. any hints?

edit: possibly i could take get involved through bizdev/marketing?
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I think there's a good chance that MacRuby could perhaps ship with XCode and become a first class, officially supported option for OS X development. And unlike, say, the Java-Cocoa bridge, MacRuby may in time become a desirable option for some developers and some types of projects.
(BTW, I'm the author of the tutorial) Think of it this way: when you're trying to find something in a city, doesn't it help that the buildings are all properly numbered? Sure, what's important is the building itself, not the fact that its number is 1050 or 1051. But the numbers still help you find it.

Same thing with a grid, it's not the content structure, but it helps make that structure more obvious and the page easier to navigate.

A page without a grid is like a city without building numbers. There may be some great museums and awesome libraries, but what use are they if nobody can find them?
I heard about OnLive two years ago when they presented at E3. Glad to see their product is actually out and they're pushing hard to get it adapted. I'm interested to take up this offer just to test out the response time.
In fairness, as a Canadian living in the US, if I were really rich I might move here because of the quality of healthcare I could get. This doesn't mean the system does the greatest good for the greatest number (by any stretch).

The US is easily the best country in the world in which to be rich.
Oh, definitely. If I had a dollar for every time I got burned by formmail.pl...
Cool Service. Have you considered putting it up on something like Appsumo (and lowering price). That has potential to increase volume, exposure and your bottom line.
Check Out ClueDB, Joshua Schachter's Cool Little Side Project
The above post contains an error. Janos Pach is not the mathematician who solved it, he was merely commenting on it. Misread the original article from the university.
It is highly likely that 2pac will have another album out (that guy works hard!)

There is very little chance of this happening, although I hope I'm wrong.
I think you are going about it wrong. Find things to solve that you are excited to solve, rather than 'improving yourself'. I mean make games, puzzles, stupid shit - whatever seems fun to program. Do it enough, and you will start having to stretch your skills.
The linked page breaks the back button. Why would they do that?
I mean application from the user perspective, i.e. you don't go: "Hey I'll start up Flash and do something with it." Other things start Flash, the user never just starts Flash on their own.
Awesome! A great refresher. {nostalgic of the simpleness of life back in highschool...study and learn}
I don't believe that the tutorial deals with "minute details" that will only be noticed by 10% of the people. But I'll go along with your point.

I think you're coming at this from the wrong point of view. Of course, the other 90% (i.e. what the site actually does, its content, etc.) are more important.

But the goal of this tutorial was teaching what I know, i.e. design, and specifically the visual part of web design (i.e. I didn't talk about branding, interaction design, etc.). So that's what I wrote about.
I can't say don't go back to get a degree, but I can speak from my own experience that I learned more in my first 1-2 years working than I did taking classes. CS is very centered around academia and the science of computing, not how to program and get things done.

You forget stuff too eh? Here's a simple solution that I think everybody should do, not just you. Take notes on what you do. Keep a little recipe book of things you've had to look up and figure out. At least you might recognize that you've seen the problem before and have solved it, then you can just go to your own reference to refresh your memory. If you're diligent you'll get a great resource in the end. Make sure if you do this to back it up.

Honestly, it sounds to me you read HN too much. There's a lot of shit on here about what everybody thinks makes a decent programmer and it can make anybody feel that they don't have skillz. Take it with a grain of salt. If you like what you do, you're always interested in learning more and you realize you don't know it all(this obviously is the exact opposite of your problem) then that's enough.

So learn about compilers and discrete math, and FFT, etc, if only to give yourself some familiarity with them for future reference. But please don't force yourself to learn about all of that unless you've got a keen interest, and learning about each subject is the goal rather than a chore that's in your way of being a "good" programmer. Learn what you need when you need it or you're liable to burn yourself out.

I too am sorry to hear about your dad.

Whatever you might think about you being a "cargo cult" programmer you sound like a good guy. Good luck!
I got nailed by some Whitesmoke Translator malware that seemed to re-appear every time Acrobat updated. I eventually just wiped my HD and upgraded to windows 7 which I had been putting off for a while. Nothing like a good virus to convince you it's time to wipe your HD.
FP research has contributed many valuable ideas to the programming mainstream. However, after watching entire rooms full of top 5% programmers scratching their heads in bafflement over explanations of monads I very much doubt monads will earn this distinction, at least not in any kind of explicit use.
True, in the grand scheme. You make a good point.
Responding to this cos it got a high vote...

I don't feel comfortable linking to such sites on Hacker News or really talking about them here in any more depth.

Feel free to contact me offline from HN if you want me to suggest some leading examples. (details in my profile)

UPDATE: turns out the original author discovered all of these sites via my partner Violet Blue (http://guerillashowrunner.com/2011/02/why-a-good-porn-site-m...) -- so the circle is complete. Lol.
um, this is the internet..yes it does. additionally, you were clearly digging at gmail/google as an enterprise email solution...so that's ok, but digging at you for digging at them isn't? since when is being a hypocrite civil? also, does your mommy still tuck you in at night?
Dun Dun Dun
For those dramatic, terrifying, horrific, spooky moments!
I did my best to pick really ugly colors for the first color scheme. But I guess it does look vaguely christmas-y. Anyway the second color scheme is not outstanding either, I'll admit that. But I do think it looks a little more professional.
I really agree with this, but think that we'll see even more of a split than just math/application. I got my PhD in Information Systems and Technology, which fused a social science approach with a topic of information systems being used in different domains. I found it really useful, and think that a business-oriented/programming-oriented/math-oriented division will probably split up the field.
The complaint is that Apple's lack of TRIM support impacts performance on their SSDs; the Anandtech article says that this isn't the case. The fact that their SSDs are slower than the competition is a separate argument.
Without TRIM, there's no way for an SSD to know (without cheating) which blocks are considered free by the filesystem. Increasing the FTL free space allows an SSD to absorb more writes at full speed before needing to GC.
Essay formats
Essay formats are often prescribed by the academic institutions. However, it is always advisable for students to know all they can about the different types of essay formats. With this knowledge they will be able to write any type of essay in any essay format.
Man, just a simple twitter bot that hit me when a transaction was over a certain amount, or perhaps over a certain distance away from home, would be awesome.
The key to a great business relationship, like a great personal relationship, is communication.
> Actually, the 10 app limit impressed me. I don't want my apps as #13 in middle of 25 variations of the same app from another developer. $20 a product just isn't expensive.

Completely agree. It's like if email spammers had to pay 1 cent per spam email - spam would go away. With Android as an example, when there's no cost to publish per App, you get a ton of garbage. I think $20/app is a good value to discourage spam.
> content tube sites that have some really quite excellent taxonomy, categorization and deeper search functions - surfacing the content that each viewer wants is a unique experience for each person.

Fascinating what sort of sites have this feature?
The Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup is tomorrow, February 26
Disagree with which? That the Python version is as readable as it could be? Don't argue that with me, argue with the decision to add a utility method that makes Python 2.7 better.

As for readability, I emphatically disagree with you on how it should be defined. Readability is the result of the interaction between the programmer and the code. The interaction cannot be left out of this. There is such a thing as well-written, readable Greek. But if you don't speak Greek, it will all be Greek to you. COBOL was designed to be readable. Can you read any significant COBOL program? Old FORTRAN programmers complained that Smalltalk hideously unreadable because they didn't understand the basic concepts of OO.

That said, something that is long and full of moving parts is inherently a challenge to read. Even if you understand every piece of that Python example (I happen to), when you encounter it in code there is a lot of semantic noise to what is written. That complexity can and should be hidden. As the Python 2.7 API does.
Services such as your ISP's or Google's DNS servers are not "independent" in the same sense as AlterNIC. They still defer to the root DNS servers (the servers named after the letters of the alphabet mentioned in the article) and are basically just proxies or caches.

An alternate DNS /root/ would also mean an alternate place to go to register domain names, which is what is meant by fracturing - google.com may point to different IP addresses depending on your root.

You are correct that widely trusted DNS servers could potentially hijack people even now, but it is a slightly different problem to the one being discussed in the article.
Is there a reason that Apple needs to keep creating its own proprietary connections/protocols?

Worse, they keep changing.
Grids are a subset of ordering mechanisms. I use ordering mechanisms (including grids) often as an architectural designer. Ordering mechanisms are a useful tool for nearly all design processes (and an ordering mechanism need not be geometrical, although for web designers they usually are, which I am not objecting to).

But, by beginning with a 12 column organizing mechanism, you are saying that there is inherent worth in that mechanism. This is fine so far. But, the second you structure your layout into two or three columns -- and look at 960.gs, I don't see any that use more than three or four columns -- a 12 column grid is meaningless. What is important is now a two, three, or four column grid. What else is important is the relationship between the column sizes and spaces. Maybe all three columns are equal, maybe they are not. This depends on your design intentions. But regardless, a 12 column grid has no relation to your actual design.

I imagine myself setting up a 10x10 grid with a spacing of 10 feet. This could be useful to layout columns (architectural ones, that is). But, if I decide I want a 100x70 foot discrete space and a 100x20 foot discrete space separated by 10 feet, then the grid is not relevant to my design. If it is, my only justifiable design stance is an intentional break from that grid. I don't think you are arguing that.

Basically, why should a three column grid be forced to fit an arbitrarily chosen xx column grid? And did the three column grid really result because of the xx column grid? I see no relation whatsoever besides a broken justification for a design process.
Worse, it seems to require a full computer reboot. Every. Time. This implies it is hooked so deeply into Windows that if Reader sneezes, Windows will get an appendectomy.
Social Security: Another Way to Look at It
This is better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639193

"every Matasano employee has an Amazon account for which they can buy any book they want ever"
Why don't Apple notebooks have full keyboards?
The one thing keeping me from buying a 17in. notebook is the lack of a full keyboard with numeric keypad. I really don't want to lug around an external keypad. I already lug around a trackball with our PC notebooks and would do the same with a Mac. Every single one of our desktop Macs has a full keyboard in place of the stock shorty. It's a shame, really.
I went through the same process, but didn't think it was that bad.

RIMs web signup download process needs to be cleaned up, and the Mac installer thing was a bit weird, but I thought the docs were straightforward, and only took me a couple mins to get the sample app deployed.

My gosh.. A command line program to remote install to the vm image! At least there is a full intel compiled image, and not some buggy emulator.

You can also build decent apps using HTML and JavaScript, much like webos.

Is it just me, or has the HN crowd deteriorated to "enterprise-ey bad, apple good"

There is a lot of opportunity in this platform, but not for consumer apps. They will be very prevalent in business environments, and the os is damn responsive.
I had this idea years ago, but its implementation that matters for that I wish it all the best! (and its quick expansion into England)
If your web design includes a grid of 100 elements. By all means, yes, the grid is important.

But your design consists of three columns. Do you really need a 12 column grid to understand that relationship?
Programming in the 21st Century
MADlib: an open-source library for scalable in-database analytics
Not hn worthy.
I think you've mistaken my argument. I didn't say that the Python version looks good or is the best way to do it. It's not.

I was saying that "something that is long and full of moving parts" is easier to read than something that is short and idiomatic. I am not saying either of them represent the ideal way to do it.

My definition of readability includes the ability to convey the programmer's intention to the mind of the reader. The reader should be able to work out what is intended by the code with minimal requirements placed on them, and I think I detailed earlier why I think the Python code does a better job than simple surrounding a shell command with backticks.
James Shore: Dependency Injection Demystified
James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile
The fact that millions of people are using their software and the fact that they have a real problem to solve (to silence the haters) does not sound so depressing to me. On the contrary many developers would be happy to have such a problem
Actually for small values of n, an n^2 sort can be quicker than an nlogn sort, depending on how it is implemented.
I'm not sure the first advantage really makes a difference though. Corporate users are not buying a lot of apps. This is shown in the latest market share data, where the App Store took in $769 million in revenue, with RIM App World in second place with only $36 million. This is especially significant because RIM has a similar smartphone market share as Apple. So you've got two companies with similar market shares, and one is doing 21 times the app revenue than the other.

The 2nd point is definitely valid, but it's a niche market. I'm not saying ALL developers would abandon RIM, but just that most would. I don't think a major player in the smartphone market can afford to only go after a niche market.

I agree that a lot of the stuff I mentioned is small. But a lot of small problems add up to a big problem. It's well known in the development community that Apple and Google have superiors SDKs in terms of ease of use, as well as tools and APIs. With the Android growth explosion, they will have a much bigger app market, and Apple will probably have the most profitable market for some time to come because Apple customers have demonstrated their willingness to spend money. RIM is going to have to really up their game if they want to lure some of the talented developers away from the other platforms.
News Corp. Kicking off Myspace Sale
The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto
I've only made one comment in this thread, and it didn't contain any of those things.
Yes typical Apple, they view their products as appliances. As Steve Jobs said in 2006 or 2007[1]: "We're getting to the point where everything is a computer in a different form factor. So... So what? Right, so what if it's built with a computer inside it. It doesn't matter. It's "what is it?" How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what's inside it anymore."

Of course we still see them as computers because we're geeks, but for most people they simply are appliances. If things break they're not going to open up the machine and take a look, just like their TV, washing machine, etc.

Whether or not you feel that computers should be appliances, Apple has always had this view of their products for better and for worse.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc8QXzYQoBY
Facebook co-founder Saverin: Who cares if The Social Network is true?
I this case though people probably give him there details in expectation of getting in on something at some point if they are the right fit, whether it be mentoring, investing or deals startups and them. Doubt hes going, "need investors?, here I'll spam out 1000 of them".
Wrong. Come on, it's in the first sentence on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM ...
Does anyone know what the cost of the Pre-Order is? I don't have an account, so can't easily check this out.

I'd worked on tech like this before, but never got acceptable performance, so I'd be curious how well theirs work, if I could get it cheap.
Just to avoid confusion I'd like to clear up the reason I wrote this tutorial.

The thing is, web design isn't that hard. You can learn it by yourself (as I did) and you don't even need any artistic talent (I'm a CS major, and can't draw to save my life). Of course if you want to be really good at it, you'll have to put in a lot of work. But the basics are easy to master, and also happen to be the things that make the biggest difference.

So it's frustrating to me when I see a site that misses out on something basic like having a grid or using proper-sized fonts. That's why I thought I'd create a step-by-step tutorial that can act as a kind of checklist when you're designing a site. You don't need to follow these step religiously (or even in that order), but I'd advise that you at least consider how each of them could apply to your design.

BUT I'm not saying that every site should adopt the same grid and the same boring "Web 2.0" look (I picked that look because it's become somewhat of a standard, for better or for worse), nor am I saying that visual polish is everything. You still need a good product or interesting content behind your site's good looks.
I believe New York now admits to spending about $17K, which is not $20K (which I heard on TV last night).

On average, it seems that it was around $10K 5 years ago. This would be a respectable amount IF the results, on average, were good. But they are not.
On two occasions, my wife received PDF monstrosities via her school. The first time, I was astounded at the size of a PDF we had to download. When we opened it, it contained a movie. I was dumbstruck.

The second time, I tried to open one with Foxit and was informed that I MUST use Acrobat, which I dutifully installed. This PDF was actually a browsable archive of OTHER PDFs.

We already have video files, and even streaming video. We already have zip files. I want to beg Adobe to stop the madness, but if they've already put an email server inside Reader, there is truly no hope.
Rather useful in this case could be an adaptive method. First, you update every 50ms until you circled in the moment when the second toggles. Then you can do sleep(1) again and save resources.

Alternatively, use time() to only sleep the remaining timespan until the next second.
Then, I am all ears to why Google refuses to take down, when asked, scam pages of open source products with toolbars and other adware/malware.