skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested in Isaiah Berlin too, but I wouldn't submit that link. It's not particularly good. It probably wouldn't get many hackers interested in Isaiah Berlin. But if you felt the article was particularly good, I don't see why you shouldn't go ahead and post it. It would be within the HN guidelines to do so.

It's impossible to follow the guidelines precisely, because good hackers aren't all interested in the same things. For any post outside the safety zone of, say, programming, startups, math and maybe physics, there will be some good hackers who aren't interested. But it doesn't follow that others won't like it a lot. The trouble with the "off-topic police" is that they're trying to speak for all hackers about what's not interesting. Le HN c'est moi.

Edit: How about this? Do you think I should submit it? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858701285435131.html
Ask HN: do non-dev staff at your company use version control?
We have 8 people at our company, half of which are non-developers. Over the last year, I've got everyone using SVN to keep local repos of our products. Customer service people can setup new customers knowing they always have the latest version. They can also edit copy if necessary.

Now, I'm starting to use Git for some new projects. I'm wondering if its too much to ask non-dev people to also learn/use Git in the future.

Thoughts? Do non-dev people at your company use version control?
John Resig: Open Web Podcast #2
I think the instant single click payment acceptance and processing makes it a little different from most Linux package repositories.

Also, a dude who is running Linux and browsing a repository of software to try/install on his machine is also not doing anything "traditional," in terms of everyday average person computing, and especially retail, which are what I think the author was referring to when mentioning a "traditional distribution model."
They are equiprobable. When the coin is flipped, it is 50% likely that it will be heads or tails. When it's tails, Beauty must be interviewed again. Therefore, the number of times she's in the state Monday+tails is equal to the number of times she's in the state Tuesday+tails. However, the number of times she's in the state Monday+tails is equal to the number of times she's in the state Monday+heads. No other possible states can occur, so these three states are equiprobable.

The answer is that at any point in time, absent other information, the coin is equally likely to be heads or tails, but as soon as Beauty receives the new information that she's being interviewed, it changes the known information, making it 1/3 instead of 1/2.
The fee may weed out a certain breed of scrappy startups, but ability to pay is an enduring fitness signal.

I have a hunch Demo will still be around after Arrington retires and TechCrunch becomes a bubble-nostalgic brand like FuckedCompany or RedHerring.
I have thought at times that allowing the definition of constructors in interfaces would go a long way towards solving this problem. It's much easier to manage dependencies with cleaner patterns when you don't have to define some ugly Configure(MyConfiguration) method and throw exceptions if it hasn't been called before you do anything else.

In their example an interface doesn't really help since CreditCard is probably a value object, which don't generally provide implementation variations, however you see the problem in the Database and OfflineQueue types, whose lack of an interface is going to add complexity to the test (CreditCardProcessor takes an OfflineQueue but imagine OfflineQueue requires implementors to configure a queue address at runtime, taking IQueue instead would allow you to pass in a mocked IQueue).
10 Futuristic User Interfaces
The USA has inclusiveness in its charter. A social news site is free to be as inclusive or exclusive as it cares to be. If the mix of topics on HN is not to someone's liking, then moving elsewhere is a valid suggestion. For me, it wouldn't be a good one, though.
Save the planet? Buy it.  (Ecophilanthropy)
JavaScript harmony
I'm curious to know why TechCrunch is not appreciated. Has it, in your opinion, become some sort of new "Startup Mainstream" that purveys a consensus that's become a bit separated from reality?

I find TechCrunch to be a good news source for its particular niche. But I don't always find news intellectually stimulating.
I was in Zimbabwe in September of last year. This article matches very closely with our impressions of the political climate of the country and seems consistent with the opinions of the Zimbabweans we talked to -- at least, those who were willing to talk openly about politics. Certainly there's an economic war going on, but it seems a civil war, where any semblance of a functioning economy has long since been manipulated into uselessness by Mugabe's hand. I carry my own biases to be sure, but it was hard not to draw this conclusion from what we saw last year and the terrible decline since then.

Zimbabwe's current situation is complex, charged, and forged out of decades of conflict among groups inside and outside the country. I can't argue outright there isn't another broad perspective on what's happening, but I'd like to read about it for myself. Please post links.
I don't know. I'd find it annoying to build a large application in javascript, but I suppose it could be done. There are some attractive alternatives like GAE and Heroku. That said, cloud services are a hot area, and there are plenty of new tools that Appjet could leverage, like S3 and couchdb.
I wonder if this is a reaction to my comment that better credentialing and education was needed in the programming industry. It is needed, from the standpoint that lots of shoddy work gets done. I don't think there's a reason why this couldn't be done by the private sector, though.
Lusty Daisy – the link in my Lesbian chain
Daisy finds paradise with her bisexual friend
The way myzagines presents the magazines is pretty impressive. Furthermore, the scans contain all the original advertisements. Meaning, the 16,000+ users are also seeing the ads. Plus no paper is being wasted by producing magazines that no one buys/reads.

It wouldn't be hard to monetize the site and I'm sure lots of people would be willing to pay $5-10/month for some sort of "all you can eat" subscription (I would).

It's like the PRQ guys created a nice distribution platform for these publishers and they don't even realize it.
"millions." "semi-literate." haha...you made my day.
What you are describing is called Payola and it's illegal.
I hope we can avoid rabid libertarianism here. It seems to me that I've been downmodded recently because I might disagree with that ideology, even though my position was entirely orthogonal.
A poll, naturally, will convey what the group of people here voting tend towards, which seems rather pointless. You can get a feel for what the voting crowd would like by seeing how they vote.

The important question in my mind is, "Why did you come here and what will make you stay?" And for me personally, another important question is, "What is your connection with startups?" A much more interesting poll I found was this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223846

It established that most of the voting crowd here actually has nothing to do with startups and only one in five of the folks that vote here have founded one.

From my perspective that, if the trend continues, endangers my reason for being here (and I suspect the reason that most of of came here in the first place). If Hacker News moves in the direction of simply being another nerd-news outlet, it'll be a second-rate one. The opinions I value, honestly, are not that of the majority, but of the interesting minority that are the raison d'être of this site.
I'm actually finding more hackerish stuff on Reddit than here now that Reddit is so customizable. The re-write really helped people to adjust the signal to noise ratio on Reddit. I just don't think that too many people have tried it out, yet.

My current sub-reddits:

* Worldnews
* Programming
* Business
* Geek
* Python
* Scifi
* Cogsci
* Politics
* Funny
* Science
* Technology
* Linux
* Lolcats
* Energy
* Math
* Ruby
* Haskell

It gives me a pretty decent mix of Hackerish news with some fun stuff and politics mixed in as well. The startup news and quality of discussion on this site is still far superior to Reddit, however.
Ask HN: How to/ what make(s) a good online demo for YC applications?
What software should be used?
How long should it be?
Should you only talk about features that are already built?
Is it really bad if you don't have one?
Awesome video. A classic.

Anyone know where I can find the Simpson's parody? It's been removed from YouTube and everywhere else I looked :(
What about Bluby..err Ruby? :D

well, if i look on the situation more seriously, python is more popular than ruby, and ruby has some features that make it a tiny bit more powerful in some situations so if the author if such an underground freak, he can use ruby for a few months until it becomes Bluby too.
User experience is one big advantage that the iPhone has. Should RIM attack and erode the iPhone's advantage, or hit back at iPhone's weak points? (Awkward typing, problems with battery life, weak 3G reception.)
You can make it attractive, but trying to force them to stay for x years is probably useless. You have to let people go where their abilities take them. Maybe offer loans to start businesses for those who chose to stay. The mandated stay stuff won't work, I would venture.
Dutch start-up will help you build almost anything you can dream up
Coventry gloryhole shopping
gloryhole fun and games in coventry
If you have more refund requests than legitimate purchases, then it's more trouble than it's worth.
I didn't see baseless hype/analysis anywhere in the definition.
Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters
I've setup a system using mercurial where a versioned archive shadows a directory of assets (html snippets and images) that is edited by customers and support staff. It works, although the rollback interface is a commandline rather than a web page at this time.

In my experience the term 'version control' might as well be martian to most customers and non-tech staff.
Ability to pay may be a sign of fitness, but willingness to pay is a sign of wastefulness and desperation. If I were a VC I'd never want to invest in a company that was willing to blow that kind of money to present to me.
There are multiple possible definitions of "platform", it just happens that I use a more inclusive one while you use a more restrictive one. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_%28computing%29:

In computing, a platform describes some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run.

edit: Isn't a good part of a framework below your application logic?
I really do want to see more bias towards science/computer science stuff, but this is one place where I can come for general intellectually stimulating reads.

So long as the content continues to be mostly well written/well thought out, with a geeky bent I'll be happy.
Because it tends to be a linkbait machine, and generally doesn't seem to be intellectually stimulating, newsworthy, well researched, or well written.
MobileMe biggest problem: insecurity
Cyberstar -- Adrian Holovaty
Dell's request to trademark 'cloud computing' denied
Why the Olympics didn't "Melt" the Internet
For the record, more than 20% of Amazon's sales are a result of recommendations -- so just in the one case of Amazon, their recommendation system accounts for $3.4 billion in sales a year ... which incidentally is 22 times Facebook's revenue last year. Recommendations do suck, and VCs are throwing money at the problem because there's a market there that actually makes money.
Why Have a Start Button to Shutdown Windows?
Hair doesn't burn, right? It singes. So if your hair were on fire, it'd just smell bad and make...smoke?

Actually, anyone have scientific explanations for burning hair?
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button And Trailer
There are more people learning English in china than we have English speakers here in the US.

Maybe thats why, haha.
> C# needs more boilerplate class code than C++ or other languages.

RTFA. C++ was used as an example alongside C#.

> close to Python and Ruby.

You must be using a different Ruby than me (or maybe C# 3.0 has magically gotten rid of all its repetitive BS).

> C# and Visual C++ have huge class libraries, which makes it impossible to use without an IDE.

That was kind of part of the point.

> I'm sorry, but I would always go for the language with the big class library, rather than the one without it.

That says more about you than about whether the lack of VS on Slackware makes MS Windows a better development platform.

> I guess the real problem is sour grapes.

This "they hate us for our freedom" crap gets old really fast, y'know. It's not all about jealousy, no matter how much you wish it was.
Python more popular than Ruby? To me it always seemed that Ruby and Rails are more popular.
It's the recruiters, stupid
Well INHD hasn't existed for a while, so I don't think there will be much confusion.
Think you'll survive until 2015?
how is it different from the helma?
I found helma(helma.org) quite mature.
Compare http://appjet.com/learn-to-program/lessons/lor
to
http://helma.org/docs/guide/framework/

Is there anyone who has used helma extensively can comment on this?
From the point of view of the average programmer: yes. There are some Lisp jobs available but those are usually taken by the best programmers (as opposed to the ones that look for excuses not to learn new things).

From a quick search on dice here are the number of job listings for lisp, cobol and java.

Lisp: 26 Cobol: 1007 Java: 15494
and produce one device per year.
Right now the non-dev people at my company use FVC, but we are trying hard to get them to use Subversion (simpler than Git and adequate for their needs). Version control is so important that everybody should be using it.

FVC = Filename Version Control. SpecificationsDraft.doc, Specifications1.doc, Specifications-FINAL.doc, Specifications-FINALFINAL.doc, Specifications-FINAL3.doc etc. :)
> So does the author suggest anyone working with Java or C# should quit their job?

No. The author (me) doesn't even suggest that anyone should stop using an IDE for Java or C# development. In fact, the author suggests that development in Java or C# is best done with an IDE, and development in Ruby or Lisp is better done with powerful text processor (like Vim or Emacs) in a Unix-like environment.

If you got the impression I was saying Java and C# programmers should quit their jobs to write code in Ruby and avoid IDEs for the rest of their lives, you weren't reading what I wrote so much as reading into it.

> Or does working with vim also provide you with an alternate space-time continuum which allows you to "just" spend one year doing doing something else entirely without it affecting the world around you and the requirements that you have a job which needs to get done?

It wasn't meant to be taken as "only do this, and nothing else". It was instead meant to be taken as "this is all you need to do to test my point".
+1 for "no, anything intellectually stimulating"
. . . followed by intensive physical therapy to treat RSI.
American Press - Not what it seems
MobileMe and (lack of) encryption
GPUs are the Future of Scientific Distributed Computing
Precisely. I have to wonder if pmorici is just looking for excuses to get his/her dander up.
The first thing I noticed about that C# example was that it was written in passive voice.
I think it's extremely likely that JavaScript will be absolutely pervasive in applications in the coming years. I don't know whether AppJet is the One True JavaScript framework, the way Ruby on Rails has been pervasive for Ruby, but it's excellent business sense. AppJet, as long as it is a closed platform running in one place, will remain a niche player--and, based on the apps that have been built to date, it will be a "small app" niche, which probably isn't going to lead to windfall profits in the near future.

But, if they open it up, and people agree it is awesome on a scale similar to RoR and Django, it'll grow their niche into something quite huge. They'll get a few competitors out of the bargain, but having a huge industry to fight over is better than having a tiny industry all to yourself. Heroku, even though they have far less exclusivity for their platform (deploying RoR can be done at many hosting providers), seems to be growing at a much more rapid clip than AppJet...and I believe Heroku actually launched later, but my history might be off a bit.

Anyway, I wish them luck. I'd love to see server-side JavaScript becoming more pervasive. It's a quite nice language.
View-Style-User Mode in Opera 9.5 (or Alt-v-s-u).
I'm curious to see if he follows his own advice. Will check back in two weeks.
> that's not because text editors are inherently better than IDEs

Who said they are inherently better? They're better for some languages, and not for others -- and that (alone) doesn't make either set of languages inherently better than the other, either. That's sorta the point in the original essay.

> it's just because the IDEs for those other languages aren't that good yet, and it's unclear if they really can be that good.

Those other languages are designed for people to actually enter a state of "flow" with the language, while IDE-oriented languages like C# are designed for people to actually enter a state of "flow" with the IDE. This does not mean that the only reason to use Vim instead of VS to write Ruby is the fact that VS doesn't support Ruby. Instead, it means that one can be at least as productive with Ruby/Vim as with C#/VS, because Ruby is designed to be highly productive under those conditions, while C# is designed to be highly productive under IDE conditions.

That's the whole point -- and it looks to me like you missed half of it in your eagerness to decide that the reason people use Vim to write Ruby is that the clear superiority of IDEs cannot be achieved by a shitty language like Ruby.
What a great question. I'm particularly interested in the marketing and customer gathering methods of startups who have gone the bootstrap route instead of receiving investor money.
I saw the futuristic glass and immediately thought Pokedex. I think I hate myself
Ask YC: Have you ever made a demo (of demoscene culture)?
Governments seem to be the biggest barrier, which probably isn't surprising when you consider that a company exploiting a resource is probably paying quite good taxes, adding to the economic statistics of the country and employing a lot of voters.
The reason that I frequent this site is because of the self consciousness that most individuals uphold to allow themselves to compose thoughtful and meaningful posts. I don't think the concern for most of the community is the genre of the articles, rather, the quality of those posts and the conversations that follow. There really is use and interest in talking about such matters within the community because for the most part, the HN community is mostly composed of refugees from sites like reddit and digg that no longer find a use in wasting their time in thought and contribution to a hopeless cause. The greatness of this community is the ability scale yet retain users that post over one sentence and thankfully avoid trying to be the thread clown and get the wittiest post (yet when they are lacking in quantity they make up for in quality).

I don't know if I have made my point clear (which is not out of the ordinary), but there always seems to be posts on the current state of the community which to me is always a good thing. When the most sites grow they tend to be come deluded and the core users become disenfranchised and subsequently the site runs on a wild course. I have had a long day and I don't even know what I am talking about at this point, but to me the greatest fear this community should have is the quality of posts, not the topic of conversation (the focus should be on intellectualism).
good press Aaron!
I'd find it annoying to build a large application in javascript

Why?

It's a pretty darned powerful language. ExtJS and YUI have shown that it can work for quite large projects in an OO manner, and jQuery has shown that it can be made exceedingly concise and pretty. It's missing a lot of niceties for working with the system, which is a big negative (and one of the same reasons that Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk haven't had as big an impact as more recent attempts at dynamic languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby have had), but I assume that as the non-browser implementations become more popular, those problems will be addressed.

I think, when all is said and done, if the committees don't manage to kill what's great about JavaScript (by, for example, bolting on more Java-style OO), it could grow to be more popular than all other dynamic languages combined. Not that I'll be switching from Perl to JavaScript for server-side work any time soon, of course.
I am talking about demos such as .kkrieger ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger ) which is a 3d FPS that is just 96 kb is size. How cool is that?
Astrology, Vastu, Plamisty Consultant
Those who know astrology can only indicate

in a way what will take place in future.

Who else, except the creator Almighty,

can say with certainty what will definitely happen ?

The term astrology is derived from the Greek words astron and logos, which literally means "stars" and "study". Legitimate astrology is founded on logical observation and deductive reasoning and is not superstition or magic. It is a body of knowledge or science that charts the positions of the planets at the exact time and place of a person's birth and determines the overall effect of celestial electromagnetic forces on a given individual's personality and behaviors throughout the course of his or her lifetime based on thousands of years of cumulative research.

Astrology is not a young science. In fact, astrology gave birth to the more modern science of astronomy, as astrologers were the first scientists to document the planet's motions with mathematical accuracy. The oldest written documents of astral observations were discovered in India and China and are over five thousand years old.
> Given what features you describe as "benefits of VS", it sounds like you haven't actually used any of the other editors you claim it is better than, since they have most of the same features.

As I read the list of features that are apparently "missing" in everything but VS, I found myself wondering what I'd been doing all these years that made me think I had capabilities I've just been told I don't have. Vim allows me to do all kinds of stuff many VS users seem to think I can't do without VS. What's up with that?

I guess the problem is that VS users expect to be able to transplant their IDE skills from VS to Vim and achieve the same level of productivity in only a week. Taking that approach to it is bound to lead to failure, just as the reverse (taking text processor skills from Vim to VS and expecting to achieve the same level of productivity in a week) would, in large part because doing the same things often requires a very different approach. That different approach doesn't necessarily make one approach any better than the other, but it is different.

. . . and nobody seems willing to keep that in mind while trying out something new and different.
It also depends on the developer's own personal preferences -- which is part of the reason I, for one, prefer the far more flexible and configurable IDE that is known as "Unix" over the more rigidly designed IDE known as "Visual Studio".
Dramatic Clippy
Certainly, Demo is not aimed at PG-style investors.

As enough time passes, it will be valuable to compare the relative followup success of companies presenting at TC vs. Demo. For example, how do the DemoFall2007 and TC40/2007 rosters compare, a year or two later? (I don't know, but I hope the more-invested partisans of the two conferences undertake the analysis.)
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.666973.1...