skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His response to a hopeful Aeronautical Engineer on becoming an Astronaut:

"Be better than the competition."

Wisdom.
Seems pretty lazy... it would be trivial to change the autoloader to check a Controller namespace/directory.
You mean like Michelle Bachmann?
I can't think of where this holds true outside of the dotcom bubble.

For eg. the curve with social just keeps going up
It's true. .NET, and C# especially, is one of the few things Microsoft really got right. Anders H is a genius -- he showed it when he did Turbo Pascal, he showed it with Delphi, and he continues to show it with every new release of C#.

Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky?

Really, the only flaw I see in C# (and clearly this is my own subjective opinion) is that I now believe dynamically (duck) typed languages are so much more empowering than strongly typed ones. To me, it seems you can get so much more done, faster, and you choose where to expend your energy to get "automated correctness". But even there, C# has the new "dynamic" keyword that allows for duck typing, so it is moving in the right direction.
In 2004 while living in New Mexico, I went and visited the trinity site, stood at the base of the tower, walked around, took pictures - the usual thing.

If there wasn't stuff telling you a detonation had taken place, I doubt you'd be able to tell without a geiger counter. Theres a nice bowl shaped depression in the ground, and that's really about it. I had figured there'd be, I dunno, a big scar on the ground or something, but there really isnt. Life goes on there.
Ask HN: What did you do to become an expert in C++?
How did you master C++ language ?
There is one easy answer: optimize revenue by tweaking this differential: revenue = profit margin * volume.
Oh, one other flaw -- C# isn't homoiconic. But every other language but you-know-what fails that one :)
I see some of the .net hate starting to seep into the corporate world as well. I work as a .net developer for a very large corporation and there is more and more talk of re-implementing production applications in Python. The perceived problem is poor code quality. It is an uphill battle to convince people that this problem is not going to be fixed by switching to Ruby if we continue to produce code by lowest bid.

I think there is a difference in .net developers and Ruby or Python developers. There is a much higher demand for .net developers so many people who had some aptitude for computers picked it up to get a job. Seems to me, people who went through the effort and sought out Ruby or Python take extra pride in the craft of programming. I would say there are just as many .net developers who care about the code they produce, but they are background noise in the sea of mediocre talents. The prospect of finding them in that sea is pretty daunting.
Oh crap. Typing too late again :s
"A 2 megabyte JS file is likely prohibitively large."

Tell that to Gmail. They load at least 2MB of code. New Twitter loads 1MB. Facebook used to load that much, but it appears they've cut it down a lot recently.

It's certainly prohibitive for webpages and lightweight page-oriented web applications, but not single-page web apps. I would expect this to be used more for the latter.
I would consider it slanderous but to each their own. I think there are more respectable (and polite) ways of protesting though.
Ruby/Sinatra
Nope.

Previous to PHP5.3 (when namespaces were introduced) most frameworks followed the Zend_Style_Of_Naming (That class would be located in Zend/Style/Of/Naming.php).

All new frameworks that support PHP5.3+ (with the exception of Fuel, it seems) have done away with Zend_Style_Naming and follow direct namespace <-> file mapping.
Every time someone pulls out that tired Edison quote I'm reminded of a response Nikola Tesla gave when he heard it:

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”

While not giving up after the first time your idea doesn't work is vital, it's equally important to avoid work when a little theory and math will save you the trouble.
It of course remains to be seen whether it's actually good.

Perhaps I'm looking at things through rose-colored glasses, but things like having to look in the dictionary to learn about things and words (and I wanted to learn about a LOT of words), hunting snails for nickels, working as a stableboy... it's usually said these days with a mocking tone, but I have become at least a bit of a believer in the old, "it builds character".
Again, tongue in cheek. :)

Though I am really buying a MBP tomorrow. I'm doing it because I need a new laptop and I like the new MBP-- but you can be sure I'll have it setup to do Windows 7 in dual boot from day 1.
For reference, the link is here:

http://techrights.org/2010/04/11/florian-mueller-and-erika-m...

Apparently Mr.Mueller thinks my removal of the link was significant enough to make note of on Twitter. I want to make it clear that my removal of the link was not in any way indicative of my opinion of him or BoycottNovell/TechRights, and I don't appreciate his attempt to imply that it is.
I looked up the characteristics in wikipedia, all applies for me except for one:

> Behave calmly and with restraint. They walk, eat and talk slowly.

I actually move fast phased and I may even look nervous, I feel that I need to keep the adrenaline flowing both for physical movement and mental actitivies.
Best of all, any negative traits he might have (besides a self-professed awkwardness around children) seem to stem from being too idealistic, which are very hard to replicate when based only on a role model. Stringent ideals typically require some deeper conviction.
Wake me up when Netflix moves outside the US.

(To add to that list: Pandora, Hulu, Spotify. Atleast last.fm is available as a paid subscription option.)
My (rejected) YC project literally addressed every single concern voiced in this article.

If you can relate to the struggles of managing and working in multi-resource, multi-project environments, sign up for the beta of FlowRocket at: http://signup.flowrocket.com.
Success stories are cheap to rattle off. We don't hear about the countless failures though, precisely because they were failures.
If both of those are true, then doesn't that mean a whole wave of sub-par Ruby and Python developers are coming our way in the next few years?
I actually like this as a concept, though iamelgringo's advice is probably better in practice. But you could run this social group in addition to taking his advice. Good luck!

Be careful with using the name YC around here though, one of the rules of Hacker News is that you can only use "YC" if you are actually affiliated with YC.
Flagged because AMA like these don't belong on HN.
PHP/ZF at work, Python/Whirlwind in my free time
Star Trek was my favourite television show back in grade school. Never got to see them all as a kid, because TV was limited to a few (crappy) channels where I grew up, but I really loved it. To this day, an episode of ST can side track me fairly easily. So I was pretty pleased by this headline.

Unfortunately, it turns out this release is only for the U.S. Seriously, wtf Netflix? You don't need to translate the episodes into Canadian, just let me watch the damn things.
يوتيوب مضحك
(Not an expert, but reasonably proficient.)

I worked with a lot of really good C++ programmers and had them do my code reviews. The best way to learn is to expose yourself to people who know more than you do and give you feedback.

As one of my coworkers is fond of saying, "If you work with people better than yourself, you'll get better. It just happens naturally."
يوتيوب اغاني
This looks like a graphical interpretation of the well-known quote: "We tend to overestimate the short term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term impact." (Dr. Francis Collins - Director of the Human Genome Project)
I had a lot of problems with that article as well. But I'd still like the give the author the benefit of the doubt. I assume he has very narrow experience with some framework like webforms or ran into some developers who did. With a lot of microsoft's frameworks it is easy to get stuck at a simple problem with no obvious solution, and conclude that there is no possible way to do it within that framework. Most of the time if you keep digging , you will find that there usually is a simple, elegant way to solve your problem but many people just give up, and decide that Microsoft just sucks.
Both the asp.net's should just be a single .net - there's more to it than just web.
Yes, I'm pretty sure I will see the staffing firms send me back the same developers, but now they will be Ruby experts.

Maybe this is less about .net/other languages and more about what makes development so terrible in large corporations. But keep in mind most .net developers, of which I am one, are products or large corporate development .
Is it just assumed that all of our hacking is web stuff?

The bulk of my "hacking" (as in, stuff I do for fun) is in C these days. I use Python/Django for prototyping at work, and then C++ for production stuff.
Ask HN: finding a laptop in 2011 with the whole set of ports?
Today while giving a hand to an friend who wants to regain access to some of his old data, I realized that I depended on various cables and peripherals to try to rescue his devices, that I could run into a similar problems because I no longer had a "rescue laptop"

Years ago, I had a rescue machine, which stayed idle most of the time, but could become quite needed.

It's the kind of machine that :
- runs an old linux distro to make xp/linux hd bootable again with grub/lilo/whatever
- is used to grab network data with tcpdump from some equipment in the next room
- tests if IR remote controllers actually work,
- serves as the last resort to try to read the floppy disk where the unique copy of some historical file has been stored
- connects to the printer in parallel mode to put the printer online when the jetdirect is down for some reason
- can be used to run diagnosis on serial ports
- still has a modem so it can serve to replicate the problem a guy still on dialup is reporting.

You see the kind of machine - a lot of ports, most of which are no longer used (floppy, firewire...) but come in handy when you need them.

My googling did not return such a machine, so I guess I'll have to get a second hand.

So can anyone recommend me a laptop or a tablet with : firewire/rj45 (ideally 2x) /rj11/serial/irda/parallel/floppy/dvd/vga/tvout/wifi/bluetooth

Tablet a plus (because it will be easy to store/carry when needed)

It's just a laptop to be put in a drawer until a specific problem happens where it will be needed (3rd call this week, the 2 others were a firmware upgrade on my modem and sniffing ethernet data to find out the correct tos values)
I do not even see the need for justification : After LINQ and Rx and the maturing of Mono, .NET is now far ahead of the Java ecosystem, even including Scala 2.9, in terms of developer productivity. The only reason I am having to learn Scala is that I am already quite familiar with the Java ecosystem (having used it at work for many years before I started doing something on my own) and do not wish to start from scratch in the .NET world.
I love the concept. Are you trying to get funding to produce a decent volume or for another reason?
All I can say is http://i.imgur.com/eCOz1.jpg
It could have been a 75-minute guide if the text had better contrast. Dark grey on light gray makes it more difficult to read.
Those sound like pretty serious deficiencies for a library that purports to be a platform for serious applications.

I use tons of debug asserts in my code, but I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that asserts enable lazy coding. Most asserts should probably be replaced with proper logging and error codes.
Entrepreneurs Are Artists
Solution to the unreadable web: https://www.readability.com/
> ASP.NET MVC is closer to WebForms than Rails.

Could you please elaborate on this? I've written many websites in all three technologies and I don't see how standard ASP.NET is at all like ASP.NET MVC. Standard ASP.NET is a train wreck and a simply abysmal environment to be stuck in. People managed to make successful websites in spite of it, not because of it. ASP.NET MVC may be a bit behind the times and a total rip off of Rails and MonoRail, but it's one of the best things Microsoft has ever made.
What? No mention of Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial? It should be the de facto recommendation for everyone new to Rails.

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book
I'm sorry it DQ's the OP, but this idea is a winner.
I'd need a really basic tutorial, how to do something (like a blog engine), with Node, Express and NoSQL. Do you know of anything like that?
SugarCRM Case Studies
CRMLogic is a professional services firm focused on CRM business solutions. Our approach is a blend of management consulting and technology know-how, which provides you with contemporary business outcomes - not just software.
Read the Sam paper: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/sam/sam.pdf
IDE's are for _lusers_. Vim FTW! And Emacs is cool too.
Vim can do more than any IDE (fantastic built by the community plugins). And imho one needs to be retarded if one uses something else than hjkl or C-n, C-p, to navigate within a text document.
If this is a major problem, I would imagine site 'B' (the true originator) could actually embargo their new content until after Googlebot visits it, then open it to the public.

Combined with a few tricks to send Google to the newest content – fresh sitemaps, PubSubHubBub, links from any other pages Googlebot is currently visiting on the site – this probably wouldn't delay the release of the content to the human audience by very much.
Take a gap year and see what happens. If you succeed, awesome. Otherwise, go to school.

Going to college immediately after HS was probably one of the worst decisions I've ever made.
I'll second this... I just used Hartl's book to jumpstart my Rails knowledge and I found it to be an excellent resource.
The weirdest thing happened to me with regards to this story.

Yesterday I said to myself, that if I were to ever be a lecturer, I would want a course structured more like real-life. I even sent an email to myself, to remember to come back to it at the appropriate time.

This was the text of my email:

Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 6:27 AM
subject:	Ideas for designing a university course
mailed-by	gmail.com

hide details 6:27 AM (19 hours ago)

This is for whenever I want to start lecturing.

Don't use tests or exams.

Use projects.

Both individual and team.

Encourage students to come and present their progress every week - ensuring that I will rip them apart if they are wasting time.

-- end of email ---

Definitely not comprehensive, but I have been wondering why the 20th century educational system has failed as badly as it has. Not just in the US, but even in Jamaica too. I think structuring it so that each student is accountable for what they have done (project-wise) would produce much better results than having them learn how to take a test.

Then I come here and see a top story from Woz basically saying the same thing.

This is just one of those moments, that might seem silly - but it's weird.
"Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky?"

I did know that, and these things heavily factor into why I default to C# for most projects these days! .NET 4 is awesome.

C# is an excellent language. It has all these great things, yet doesn't feel polluted or bloated at all. I absolutely love lambdas, closures, and generics. They help write concise and clear code. Generic support in C# and F# and the CLR itself is brilliant.

Writing event-driven, asynchronous IO code in .NET code is a breeze. It seems like the current programming trend around these parts is focused on "iterating fast" and having async IO. C# gives me both of these things, with the bonus of having the compiler catch most of my errors.

I disagree with the general notion that duck-typed languages are more empowering or let you iterate faster than strongly typed languages.

If you think that a language that is lazy (or worse, unspecific) about types lets you write code faster, I think that you have some fundamental problems with how you approach development.

The whole dynamic languages = faster code production is an unsettling school of thought, in my opinion.
Offensive? As chan memes go it's pretty benign.
These are good points. Let me answer them.

1. The 0MQ devs originally got asserts backwards, using them to validate external input (e.g. on sockets) instead of internal consistency. We've been fixing this for a year or two now, and it's pretty good. You'll get assertion failures if you e.g. use sockets from multiple threads. Not so much if you pass bad stuff onto sockets.

2. 2.1 was a great step forwards, and the use of "sleep" was in toy examples. Real networking apps tend to run forever, so this message loss at exit wasn't a big deal. You're right that the product is still young.

3. Totally agreed, this lack of peer presence detection is annoying, and the source of some debate on the lists.

4. Threading model works fine for me, I've used it extensively. A usable reactor is a hundred lines of code, no more. See the libzapi zloop reactor, in C, for example.

5. Demultiplexing sounds like useful functionality but should probable sit above sockets.
This is a reminder that it's not what you build it in, it's what you build.
Because I want to drink vanilla coke and it's expensive here to import.
http://twitter.com/FOSSpatents (His twitter feed, for reference.)

Yesh, what a scuzball.
The code given in this exam is terrible.

#include <iostream.h> ?!
but you can be sure I'll have it setup to do Windows 7

Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww..... boo, hiss. Windows?!??

Sorry, when you mentioned a PC based laptop, I assumed it would have been running Linux (or BSD or Plan9 or Minix or some other proper operating system.) :-)
You are wrong about IBM not having been the aggressor. Here's a documentation of the entire correspondence:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/04/turbohercules-entire...

TurboHercules didn't make a "request" to IBM as a "bluff". Instead, IBM threatened TurboHercules with a previous letter.

Also, TurboHercules never attacked IBM with patents (I guess TurboHercules doesn't even own any patents). All that TurboHercules did later was to lodge an antitrust complaint with the European Commission. However, lodging a complaint with a regulator is not an act of aggression. Regulatory agencies will only take action if a company's conduct is suspected of being anticompetitive and unlawful. The European Commission launched an investigation in July:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/07/european-commission-...

That would not have happened if there weren't serious concerns over what IBM is doing. The outcome of the in-depth investigation remains to be seen, but the European Commission doesn't launch such investigations unless there's at least a strong indication of possible wrongdoing.
Israeli parody details the rise and fall of Apple's iBoy
Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It’s Your Facebook Wall
So, no chance of YouTube-over-DNS?
> If you only have 2 or 3 companies competing ...

If there were truly only 2 companies that provided internet in the Bay Area (this would be extremely surprising to me), collusion might be possible.

With 3, you now have a nice unstable equilibrium in game theory terms.

But what do you want to bet there are even more, and you've only heard about the name brand ones?

We haven't considered wireless broadband providers. How many of those are there?

Okay, so maybe the Bay Area's okay, but what about the rest of America? Turns out that, according to the FCC's own data, 98% of zipcodes have 2 or more landline providers, and 88% of zipcodes have 4 or more. Again, this is not counting 3g or 4g.

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-292191...
What put me off is the useless Html class. You have a method named H which produces the H(1,2,3..) tag. How is this useful in any way?
I live in Canada

/facepalm
"Epic circle jerk"

yup
I'm doing some weekend hacking using Aspen. I'm finding that Aspen is staying out of the way and any issues are actually my own shortcomings. Currently in the process of adding some Ajax to my web app.
you should be able to hold shift to select multiple as well
Processing and Processing.js, Jython, and one could argue maven hacks up java libs on the fly like magic
In my opinion it would be a serious mistake to ease the current restrictions for investors; indeed, it might be even smart to raise the bar a bit instead. Money is a sensitive matter, and allowing everyone to invest in startups will only have negative effects for everyone involved.

For one, this is laying the ground for a new bubble. Startups are inherently risky, and you'll end up with a lot of small investors blowing up their savings on the gold rush of overblown valuations.

Second, one of the greatest effects of current rules is that most of the funds available to startups are the "smart money", i.e. they come with experienced investors (VCs and angels) who add quite a lot of value besides the cash itself. Small-time investors mostly don't have that added value; not only that, but by definition their capital will be sought after by inexperienced founders, who are more likely to fail without proper guidance (as more experienced ones supposedly have more contacts and mentors available).

And third, even though there is a lot more money available today, there is still some kind of filtering process before the startups are funded. Hell, even Yuri Milner doesn't throw his money blindly to anyone who knocks on his door -- he had relegated the process to the Y Combinator team, so there still is some selection.

In short, the day this new regulations pass may be marked as the start of the new startup bubble. Mark my words.
Sounds like an elegant solution. Similar to a recent suggestion on the whole Honeycomb thing (open the code, but assert control of the Android trademark).

http://monogatari.doukut.su/2011/04/openness-and-reputation....
Issues went from almost nothing to a full featured issue management system on one step. I really like how everything is integrated with commits.

I just got a GitHub paid account, not because I need private repos but because the company is so darn awesome.
Read the Exceptional C++ series (shorter, 'highlights' version is C++ Coding Standards), Modern C++ Design, and Andrei Alexandrescu's unpublished columns.
Fictional characters make for really good role models purely because they they embody an ideal that is largely unobtainable, which is easy when the hero always needs to win by the end of the episode. That being said, any decent critique of TNG in relation to Picard would have to admit that Picard is both overly idealistic and pragmatic to a fault. But the medium is its own worst critic: there are numerous episodes where Picard skirting what are essentially his own ideals is challenged.

WWPD?
"We have to keep this group small in this first batch to make it successful."

I feel bad for anybody rejected by the rejected...
There are dozens of PHP frameworks inspired by rails, it's not remarkable.

Symfony (which Delicious 2.0, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Dailymotion v2009, etc. were built on) has a CLI too ("symfony doctrine:migrate"), and is 5+ years old.