skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The government did not try to let the market sort it out. That is simply revisionist history.

Please go read up on the New Deal as well as the Hoover administration (Hoover doubled the budget deficit in an attempt to spur recovery, resulting in FDR calling him a Socialist during the election campaign).
The worst part is the practice of deliberately trying to make someone feel bad about themselves over a discussion about iPods or something. What sort of person does that? Thankfully I hardly ever see it on HN, but elsewhere it's rife.
Getting Started with virtualenv
It's pretty easy to get up and running with virtualenv (isolated python environments). There is no reason for you to hold off like I did.
Personally, I think everyone who writes code for fun or profit should have a copy of the CLRS[0] nearby. The first few chapters are enough of have an excellent understanding of the topic of Big O. I would not recommend reading the book cover to cover, but each chapter is pretty self contained and after you get used to reading the book, makes for great weekend reading.

The thing with algorithms is you don't always see how they are useful if you aren't familiar with them, being able to quickly identify a hard problem as hard and have a solution already available is very valuable (even if you have to research the solution). If you code for fun, these are the funnest problems to think about. If you code for profit, even if you almost never need to use sophisticated algorithms in real software, making use of them even just once should give you a pretty good advantage over your competitors (since truth be told, outside of Google and the like most software developers do not have a copy of CLRS on their desk)

[0] http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...
What’s new with Blogger
Was Facebook
Cool idea, seems like facebook makes their recommendations based only on mutual friends, which is great for connecting to other friends or people in your network. This interest based approach would do a better job of meeting brand new people altogether.
I don't think anyone disagrees that brick-and-mortar businesses require investment. However, brick-and-mortar businesses earn their investments by having actual revenue plans. I have the impression that most VC-funded web startups find revenue plans far less sexy than, ahem, eyeballs. And we all know where that leads.
I thought it was interesting. Made it through to the end and pretty much agree with the points you're making. More people should consider the long term effects of building on platforms where they have no control of direction. Everyone knows the sharecropper story, not enough people consider it.

Also, many congratulations on having a wife who sounds like a saint.
The FSF has a great article explaining why this is necessary, and how the existing offerings come into play (and where they fall short): http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/#skypereplace...
Each of the `Excellent xxx' response you give differs in two important hitches from the `Insecure xxx':

1) it requires much common context, understanding, experience.

Everybody will understand a ``this sucks'' response, regardless of the reasoning behind it being clear.

Understanding a, and building better solution on, an involved response requires common understanding, common experience, between the parties of communication. (What the heck is a 4/2 split? I dunno, honestly; this response only serves as a distraction to me at that very moment).

Lacking common experience is a communication barrier hard to climb, thus frustrating. It may be that very precise subjects (like computer science) provide for more such barriers, thus more frustration.

2) the ``This sucks'' response lets you vent anger. Now there are two conflicting theories about controlling strong emotions... ;-)
FFmpeg forked as libav
I dont buy it, a Giant screen a'la times square is not just a scaled up TV. The "repeater" would need to be where the video controller hardware was housed. I'm guessing here, but I doubt that its directly behind the display like it is on the flat screens in a sidewalk kiosk. I also agree that the multi screen displays are controlled by external signal sources that handle splitting the source up.
Show HN: My weekend project - GonnaLaunch: One step pre-launch landing pages
Also, if you middle mouse click on photos (which is my natural style of browsing), you view them in the traditional non-lightbox way.
But what if you really start at the bottom? Like a homeless person without job. I wonder if those rules could also be applied to them. Because if they do, I would like to tell the guys in the street...
I also noticed the proportion of Windows users has increased; Windows folks now make up half of iPad buyers.

Can you say platform conversion, boys and girls? I thought you could.
Why "please don't become a politician" in the top response? It may or may not be a happy career, but I'd rather have more of "us" doing it...
I was just under the impression the python community has a long tradition of getting things done while being far from experts in the language, i.e., a far greater proportion of non-professional programmers who just use python to make one part of their real job go smoother.

This leads to a very high tolerance of people new to the language, and to misunderstandings.

Ruby and perl seem to have more typical professional programmer types is all.
People who lack social tact need to be taught it. They aren't stupid, generally, they can be taught, if it's made clear that they must.

Treating people badly is a great way to drive out those who don't have the ability to deal with flamewars and shoutiness. And many of those people have a lot to contribute.
The hard part is getting people to agree that 2pi is the true "circle constant" and that pi was a historical accident; once you've gotten over that hurdle agreeing that it should have its own symbol is a no-brainer.
i started learning to code in December/January. I've been pleasantly surprised by how helpful I've found people to be in places like #rubyonrails, #jquery, ...

I come across a random jerk here or there, or just some snarky, passive-aggressive commentary from time to time from otherwise OK people. I find if I am nice, humble, and honest about my abilities/intentions, people are generally nice in response.

Sarcasm has proven to be pretty successful on the web, which doesn't help your cause. How many successful blogs were built on a glib and critical tone? Being a jackass is an easy way to differentiate...I think this influences the general discourse on the web, especially among the savvy. That said, from what I remember, "web people" were far more ruthless 15 years ago.
I like that it hides the fraction. I'm a computer scientist. I don't like fractions.

Instead of celebrating tau, we should be celebrating integers. Robust, fast, compact, reliable, easy to understand. With pi I can use more integers. Thank you pi!
Except there is much more to a sport than, for example, shooting a basketball. There's offense, there's defense. There's fundamental skills, there's game strategy, there's different sorts of matchups. It goes on and on to subtler and more intricate detail. It's not simply whether one can skateboard or not, program or not, and it would seem that is what the author of the article was getting at.

In your visual arts examples, there is a much simpler explanation. The reason there are more pages devoted toward layout principles is because the medium of expression (i.e. the web) fundamentally uses layout principles. Drawing doesn't express using the web. It's a selection effect, just as it's more likely that you will find soccer players in Brazil, and hockey players in Canada, rather than the other way around.
I disagree with this.

The difference in the examples cited is not sports vs hackers, it's communication in real life vs over the interwebs.

In my experience most hackers are perfectly pleasant in person, happy to help if asked, and not substantially different to how the article describes the skaters.

Conversely, I bet if you look at some skater videos on youtube they would be full of sarcasm and piss-taking (well they would be if youtube comments weren't a massive fail in their own right)

Geeks and nerds more frequently use online media to communicate, but I don't think they are otherwise more predisposed to antosocial behaviour than anyone else.

As a datapoint, my wife uses babycentre a lot, and the disproportionate flamewars you get there are ridiculous. Put those mothers together in a room and I bet they'd be completely pleasant.
> - I have to kill Firefox in order to make sound work in VLC... wtf?

Sadly, that's not a Ubuntu-specific problem. Recently, I had to borrow an openSuSE box for a few days and this was basically the first time I used client-side Linux in ten years and I was appalled. One of the many many annoyances was that only one program could use audio at a time. Like you described, I had to close Firefox after playing a Youtube vid, just to open VLC in a functional state (and this was on KDE I believe).

After all these years of not looking at the state of GUI on Linux I was extremely surprised by how little advancement happened in this time. I don't say this to flame, but I'd be really interested how things ended up in this sad state. The overall "experience" is just a nightmare.
It's so beautiful!
Alternative operating systems
IPad 2′s HD output-games, websites, anything-looks fantastic on HDTV (w/video)
Could not have said it better though I doubt things will change. I hope so though!
That's absolutely untrue and intellectually dishonest. The Feds, as indicated by Friedman and Krugman, were tight with the money supply. Because money wasn't flowing, the economy wasn't running. Please go and read the causes for The Great Depression on any economist's website (or even Wikipedia).

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depressio...
Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process
On June 28th. Today you can eat half a tau...
The real problem seems to be people who can't separate themselves from the mistakes they make and take everything as an affront to their person. Receiving criticism means that your idea or work is at least worth considering.
I don't know about this. I presume you mean she's using something like Google Talk, built on XMPP? While that's true, I'm not sure it has the same requirements. Twitter works because there's no fragmentation - everyone you care about is in one place. A system of loosely federated systems would lose a lot of the "authoritative source" value it seems. Of course, I could be wrong here, that's only an initial reaction, so feel free to correct me!

(I presume on Google Talk it's only commonly possible to speak to other people on Google Talk? I presume you could change the server config or set up your own XMPP servers, etc, but does anyone?)
Web Standards Sherpa
Definitely gotta work on the design. I just don't see the use for this. Creating one page signups is relatively straight forward...
I think Rubashov understands that the process generating these waves is nothing like that which generates the tides, but correctly observes that the process resembles a tide--huge volumes of water rising, then falling back into the sea--more closely than ordinary waves, no matter their size.
If you're doing complicated math or physics, the last thing you want is to be off by a multiple of 2 when you're done. It's happened to me enough times, I almost wish I were still doing physics so I could use tau instead of pi.

For electron charge, I have, at times for intermediate calculations, used 'e' in place of the negative sign from electrons, and then substituted -1 at the end. Being off by a multiple of -1 is just as annoying as a multiple of 2.
that's how you write haskell the first time. that's fine. easy, nice, simple. you've written a lot of code; it compiles, it works, no problem.

then you realise that you want to change a data structure or a function needs some information that you want to weave through it or you used the wrong abstraction. then it's a pain in the ass.
They did it again. I don't think any company is as consistently great as Apple. Not a fanboy, just calling it like it is...
Great post, thank you Chad.

I'm feeling the same disdain about committing to Twitter. I launched http://socialgrapple.com/ a few weeks ago--a social graph analytics product built on the Twitter API, and I'm pulling a bit of revenue already (a dozen paying customers). Now I have two choices: I have some wicked ideas of how to expand further on the Twitter API and provide even more value to customers who have expressed clear demand, or do I try and diversify onto other platforms to avoid getting bulldozed.

I know I can build a better and more valuable service with less effort by continuing to build on the Twitter platform. My developer instinct says "do it" but my business instinct says "forget the opportunity and diversify somehow." Diversifying is tricky because the graph mechanics on Facebook aren't the same, it seems the value of this intelligence is lower. Only other relevant market I can think of is something to do with SEO/web search terms vs domains.

I also know Twitter is building an internal analytics product, based various leaked screenshots, to complement their business model (tracking tweet impressions) but luckily it seems there's no overlap with what I'm building... yet.

I don't mean to hijack this thread but it seems relevant and I would love some feedback.

--

On a side note, I wrote a post in another thread that questions the details about the recent shift in Twitter's spirit towards developers:

What if before @replies, #hashtags, RT's (all invented by third parties), @Twitter said "don't make more clients"?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321837
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
I sent this link to the admissions staff. 6/28 decisions next year, perhaps?
First-generation aversion?

That was my reason to buy the iPad2 when the iPad was originally announced. Let the product prove itself and let them fix whatever mistakes they made. Nobody wants to own the next Kin.
No, you can chat with people across servers, thus the federation. Somebody using jabber.org can talk to somebody using gmail.com.

There are even bridge transports to let jabber users talk to ICQ users and Facebook users. It's quite extensible. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber
Richmond VA? Was picturing Richmond CA until I got to the end.
It was tried when it was new[1].

To me, abuse of vote to close is up there with deletionism on Wikipedia as making no sense, particularly in this case.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/4568645/revisions
From my comment on the post on Thingist:

>I don't think you can fight human nature, only work around it. Ignore the haters that don't get $x. Ignore the haters that think what you've made sucks, or doesn't do $x and is therefore useless. Build shit. Write about how to do shit. Let them know you by the trail of OC you leave behind.
La Reina del sur caputilo 11 online
La Reina del sur caputilo 11 online
HolLa a amigos hoy les traigo el nuevo capítulo 11 de su Telenovela favorita odrán ver todos ustedes por esta su
La Reina del sur,caputilo 11
When setting dates and stuff the Year and Day fields are switched...
There's 3 of us now :P
A LWN article with pointers two a couple of relevant mailing list posts:

http://lwn.net/Articles/433347/rss
My ipad hasn't replaced my laptop (I got an Macbook Air 11 for that) what it has replaced is all the other crap I used to carry around when travelling - books, media, stuff I did on my phone but is much nicer on a big screen, music making tools (actually I couldn't do this on the move prior to the ipad). I recently completed a two day trip abroad with my Tom Bihn satchell , ipad , laptop, wires and a couple of clean shirts (ironed using the 'hot shower' classic)
Working link: http://www.fogcreek.com/blog/post/AppDomains%2c-AppDomains-C...
I have to say, as a former sk8er (too old now), this is typical. Skateboarders have been social Switzerland for decades. Often un-critical of ones appearance and always deep into their sport, I'm not surprised by Steve's attitude.
Haha. Possibly.
ARM Chips Designed For 480-Core Servers
Congratulations on having a sense of shame in the first place. That's the difference between you and someone who reacts by being excited that their "mixing it up" got the attention of the CEO.

However, I think many folks, myself included, who have a keen sense of shame then overreact in these situations. It threatens our identity, in some way.

If we can pull back a little from that, maybe a situation like that could totally end up as a "that's the crazy way I got to know this guy" story you can both laugh about now. They would be the one who convinced the tough critic, and you could be the one who's never shy with their opinion.
Ekiga is great, I actually prefer it to skype, as I can more easily set video/audio quality and it uses an open and standard protocol.

They have binaries for any major linux distro , mac and windows, and it's fairly easy to compile from source if needed.

The NAT traversal improved tremendously by the transparently use of stun, no configuration necessary. Give me my SIP IPv6 address and ekiga would work just fine for everyone, no need for P2P, except perhaps behind very restrictive firewalls.
It's a 404 because the url got mangled, not a 500 because their server's melting.
here are some real data (sorry, in german):

http://www.grs.de/informationen-zur-lage-den-japanischen-ker...

there was a peak at 1.2 mSv/h when the meltdown occured. All in all the values are in the range of 0.4-1 mSv/h. At least a factor 10 lower as I found in the approximation above.
Generally speaking, I find some of the things the FSF worries about groanworthy.

However, as a person who talks to people outside the US all the time (therefore, can be legally spied on by NSA, et al, most likely), it is a little annoying I am probably being recorded at least some of the time when on skype (although the most they're going to do is hear about some iPad app specs a few months early).

For people who talk about more important things (say, rebel troop movements in Libya), I think a secure communications channel such as a GFC would be a fantastic thing, and I'd surely make an account to encourage that.
The Gentrification of Twitter
"...give people constructive criticisms. If their design is bad, tell them what they can do to improve it. If there code is bad, offer to help them patch it and make it better. If there spelling or grammar is off, just let it go."

I perceive a profound inconsistency.
It's for people who are backing up their music, and then sharing publicly. Private backups shouldn't be effected.
Whoops. Fixed :)
Nothing wrong with JIRA or Greenhopper but its use, by itself, does not make a group "agile".
given the fact that each A9-cortex core needs 250mW at 1Gz, for a 240-core/2U machine, we are looking at 60W. which is pretty impressive.
Why?

If you read some people's biographies (say, Bill Gates), it looks like if you'd met him when he was very young, you would have said "this guy is truly something". So you can infer, that if you are at a time when you are stopping being so young, and you are not "truly something" yet, that maybe you'll never be.

On the other hand, you read about people like Napoleon and it just baffles you... could anybody tell these people were going to be something so big, when they were young? Seems not. How did they hide it so well?

This is probably a very silly comment, I know, but I would like to know what people that have thought about this more than me have to say on this subject. (I'm not the OP)
Oh, of course. It's just that sometimes making the 80% go from easy to trivial is as interesting as the last 20% :)
How is Facebook innovating? Serious question, I'm not on FB and I'm interested.
Moral panics have a long history here; a lot of it is due to the sensationalist media culture. Government clampdowns are usually the result of whipped-up public hysteria.
We would have heard of this here in NY if this was real. Gimme a break....
That is insanely awesome. I always wanted to do more graphics stuff.
Looks like Square (http://squareup.com) to me.
Congress Islam Terrorism and Bayes Theorem
Deletion-ism makes perfect sense, it maintains a high signal to noise ratio.
Ray Kroc started Mcdonalds when he was 59 years old. Henry Ford started the Ford Motor Company at age 40 after his first attempt failed. Edison didn't patent his Light Bulb until he was 33.

There are thousands of other examples but that makes the point.
Can someone please explain the logic behind "condescending feedback = insecurity"?

And I mean that sincerely. I have been thinking about this for a long time now, and I just cannot come up with any supporting evidence to explain the corelation. It might sound like a stupid request, but I think it is a hard argument to make totally water proof.
Google Circles? Meh. Here's Lycos Circles (2004)
Well, as a computer scientist, I'd hope you use pi * r * r, because there's no reason to compute tau/2 every time, and pow() is needlessly inefficient for integer powers (on all languages I know. ~6 times slower in python). I'd expect you to make the same optimizations with the analogous equations, but that shouldn't have any bearing on which constant is better for learning, etc.
Obvious, but passing arguments to this will cause it to break.

One other mod: (j/1000) could be replaced with (j>999) which is still non conditional, but faster.
Let's give some examples of hard problems first: designing a version control system, writing a complex revenue simulation model, designing an algebra for arbitrary data model customization, etc.

If this is true then why is a VCS written in C (git) not left in the dust by Darcs?
Fascinating post.

Coming from an Engineering background I'd like to echo what another commenter said - Ideas must be treated harshly. If it's a bad idea then it needs to be vetted and corrected, especially if it's likely to kill someone. You owe it to the honor of the profession to do so. But you have to attack the idea and not the person. When egos are involved that's not easy, because the person may view an attack on their idea as a personal attack. Just assume the person is as intelligent as you and had a good reason for their "bad" idea. Maybe you can build on it without completely discarding it.

As for language, I've never understood the online "geek" community's tendancy to be grammar and spelling "nazis." There have been times where I've been the only native English speaker on a team, both professionally and in college. If we spent all of our time discussing Strunk and White we would have never finished what we were doing. Yet on the internet, where "exposure" to non-native speakers is commonplace, these practices seem to be the norm. Boggling. (It's one thing to be helpful, it's another to be petty. Petty strikes me as professionally immature.)

In short: A crash-course in interpersonal communications would help everybody.

Thanks for the blog post.
Rate my startup: Holono, showcase your projects and build a portfolio
http://holono.com/

I'm a EE college student and realized that I needed a website to show off all my projects. After talking with some of my friends I realized that it was an issue a bunch of people had.

The site is quite simple; you make pages to showcase all of the projects you have done or are doing. A "project" could be electrical research, a startup, an adventure, or anything else you are proud of. As you add things you'll make a pretty portfolio of your accomplishments.

I've been working with two other Harvey Mudd students to build the site. None of us knew rails until we decided to give it a go about 4 months ago. So far we've debuted it to our college, but are now opening it up outside of that.

We'd really, really appreciate some feedback. The website has taken quite a bit of work but I think could be very useful.
Half A Billion Blog Posts Later, Google To Give Blogger A Revamp
I <3 Ubuntu (server and desktop)