skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"OK, everybody: stop calling views you disagree with 'a purely religious belief'."

If you take the position that the human race can be improved through eugenics and call it a scientific belief then the burden is on you to produce the science. I'm not taking the position that eugenics absolutely can't work, rather I'm taking the position that the science to support eugenics just isn't there so people who do support it support it on other grounds. If you can produce some books or journal articles making the case that eliminating intra-species biodiversity can make that species as a whole more resilient then I'd gladly recant.
But this is the exact problem. Why should each window manager be its own platform? This is like having every car produced by GM or Toyota being totally custom-built, with parts that can't be interchanged, without great pain, with anything else in the range.
1. No. First, because we don't know how genetics really works. Second, because it violates an individual's freedom.

2. Genetic and social aren't separate things, but parts of an evolutionary continuum. Google the Baldwin Effect. Yes, there are many theories. Read any book about evolutionary psychology.

3. No.

4. Citation, please.

5. No.

6. Yes, but not what you're thinking. No.

7. Stupid question.

8. Yes. None.

9. Nothing.

10. Nothing, none.

11. No. Market economics.

12. Evolution. That they aren't what they at first seem.

What a load of crap.
Do you mean with the ad that, obscuring the content, follows you down the page?
Well, I'm not really sure I grasped the most important features in the first 10 seconds of browsing. Perhaps a few example projects? For instance, it would be a good move to put up a pre-built page for someone interested in learning a new language or framework - Lisp, C, Python, Cocoa Touch. This way devs could immediately see how the service would help them (since most devs don't know all of these languages).

You should also consider a screencast demo.
Apply to them and get through the initial phone screen. (And don't take the job I want ;-P.) I'm not sure if they're public.
Why are people talking like 37signals is in a sustaining mode? They regularly release new products and significant new features for existing products. I'm pretty sure the people there still get the sense that they're creating something new.
sigh not again..

SMS GupShup's business and technology are very different from Twitter's. SMS GS is geared towards distributing SMS's, not displaying them on pages/open API's. That makes a huge difference.
Sorry, perhaps I was unclear, I was trying to contrast rock stars with rap stars.

Rap stars are the 2008 equivalent of rock stars, but nobody talks about rap-star programmers, because rappers aren't nearly as cool -- at least, not to the demographic which tends to dominate programming.

And that's why we still aspire to be rock stars even though rock barely appears on the sales charts in this blighted age.
Way to go dude. Neat idea.
Perl - When you can snatch the punctuation from the Larry...
it does ramble quite a bit. i had to google for it to figure out what the "awesome bar" is. a decent explanation is available here: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/139037...

based on that, i gather that firefox's "awesome bar" is crude... in comparison to the ui features that isaac asimov would have put into his next firefox-based sci-fi novel.
Does this work on the iPhone? Because that would be a killer app.

Having to zoom the page waaaay in just to make sure I don't accidentally click on the wrong button with my fat fingers is very tedious.
This is resolutely brilliant.

My employer follows the Starbucks antipattern of calling employees "partners". No longer content to be a UNIX Engineer, I'm henceforth a UNIX Barista.

Thank you for this. You've made my day.
If you want a "rock star" developer, you can't ask someone to self-select. You have to know them, and then ask them directly.

I would never call myself a "rock star" (because it's a dumb expression), but I've personally never looked at a job ad and responded. I've always gotten jobs through friends that specifically said they would hire me. When you are going to spend 40 hours a week with someone, it's good for you to be friends.
I steer clear of rock star job listings too. I suspect it means they have a weak team, weak technology, or both, or some kind of tangled mess, and they hope someone can come and fix it all for them while the other team members hold their responsibility at arm's length.
My Grandpas Garden
Not sure what to do tonight? Stuck in a quandry Ask a random person to give advice
I mean… will any employer possibly care if I told them that I've worked through half of SICP, internalized maybe thirty Emacs commands, can do some moderately interesting stuff with sed and pipes on Unix, and can write crappy Perl code? Will all of this stuff remain merely a secret weapon of mine while I continue on in work environments where such tools are unknown, actively feared, or completely off the radar?

Now what?

Start your own company (duh, right?), or become a manager at one. If you know these things, you can probably spot talent a lot better than the average manager... and companies want managers who can spot talent well.
Beginner Pilot
Blu ray player
AOL To Shutter A Slew Of Products including Xdrive, EVP Kevin Conroy’s Future Uncertain
So true.

http://nullstyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/inconsolata....

(Thanks, Google Images)
Try walking on the floor instead, and they might not catch on to your secret identity.
Probably the best phone support system I've seen was where if the wait time was going to be more than ~5-10 mins, they would call you back when they were available.
Ask YC: Share Your Lisp Resources
All,

I am an editor at the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org). For those that are unfamiliar with the project, it is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. I have just recently become the editor of a category having to do with Lisp FAQs, Help, and Tutorials (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Lisp/FAQs,_Help,_and_Tutorials). The category has been poorly maintained in the past, and while I have added several sites to it over the past few days, I could really use your help! Feel free to submit sites you find useful through this link: http://www.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/add.cgi?where=Computers/Programming/Languages/Lisp/FAQs,_Help,_and_Tutorials. You can also just post the URL here.

Thanks for helping to spread the word about Lisp!
I'm not saying that it's a scientific belief, I'm saying that it isn't a religious belief.

There are many other types of belief, including:

* belief based on incomplete experience (The traffic on I-80 is going to be terrible on Friday)

* belief based on wild-assed guess (oil is going to be under $100 a barrel by the end of the year)

* belief based on the fact that somebody told you it was true and you haven't bothered to check (The Nissan GT-R produces 480 horsepower)

* belief based on not having thought it out very well (We should invade China!)

* belief based on wanting to have that belief purely to annoy others (I think we should kill poor people!)

* belief based on personal prejudice (McCain sucks!)

* belief based on wanting to conform with the beliefs of your peer group (Lisp is awesome!)

"Purely religious beliefs" are characterised by things other than just being unsupported. A necessary but not sufficient condition is that they should be both unsupported and strongly held.
I'm just talking about the current state. It is a fact that interop between GNOME, KDE, and whatever else is so poor that the only way to achieve usability today is to pick one platform and stick with it completely. In some cases the differences between the platforms are arbitrary and they could interop or be merged, but in some cases the differences are philosophical and IMO irreconcilable (you might as well merge the Democratic and Republican parties). Given that situation, I don't see any way to create a single Linux desktop market. But then you probably shouldn't listen to me; I don't even use Linux on the desktop.
In case you were curious about what the current percentages were, here is the link to the NSF statics site http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf07307/content.cfm?pub_id=36...
Some people simply need to be told to check the power cable and reboot. Many people in your company are capable of giving these instructions and not much more.

Some people simply need to be told "use regedit and change DMAmode to 3". There are a few people in your company capable of giving this instruction at the right time.

The secret is protecting that latter group from the former. (In both cases). I've found that in most of my dealings with phone support, its the escalation method that is broken. As much as I hate to say it, Microsoft's contract support is actually extremely good at getting this right. I usually get from "reboot" to "regedit" in less than 30 minutes, and they usually fix it.
When you look at two choices and can't tell immediately which one, neither matters.
Shuttleworth IS the Steve Jobs of Linux. Linus is the poster child for the technical guy, but Shuttleworth needs to lead the style. However I find him lacking in specific vision, he says these things are problems, we need to find solutions, but Ubuntu never provides a revolution. I feel like Ubuntu has found the annoyances of Linux and fixed many of them, but they aren't necessarily visionary changes.
Nice script! I quite like it... though its too early to tell whether or not it'll become my preferred method of hacker newsing.

One big issue (may have been tarkin2's problem), but an easy one to fix, is that news.ycombinator.org also points to hacker news, but your script is only active on .com!

Another thing: is there any way you could set the height of the open comments/article frame to the height of the browser viewport (minus 25px for the header)? this gets rid of the annoying problem of scrolling all the way to the bottom of an article (or comments), and then having to switch focus to the main frame just to scroll to see the bottom of the internal frame.

Thanks for the helpful script!
You know the problem with developing something, is that you know everything about it... and so it's hard to figure out what to explain and show to a normal user in 10 seconds

As far as the new language frameworks I did start writing something of a "C++ crash course for non-C++ programmers"... but those things take much time and editing... and it's difficult to motivate the average user to contribute content to a random site.

The screencast is a good idea... Also I've been toying with the idea of putting some sort of collapsible 'scratch pad' or pastebin on the home page since I always end up pasting important SQL into /tmp files
To quote Wikipedia:

"The effort is not aimed at eradicating the hereditary traits, but rather at the occurrence of homozygosity. The actual impact of this program on allele frequencies is unknown, but little impact would be expected because the program does not impose genetic selection."

The word eugenics really describes two different things. Trying to reduce homozygosity, and long term breeding to select specific traits. While what you are describing is called eugenics, I think it's a little disingenuous since it's not the type of eugenics the original author was talking about. (The list was a list of taboo subjects, and there is clearly no taboo surrounding talking about blood testing for Tay-Sachs.)
If a founder has a particular artistic vision that he feels passionate about, nothing is stopping him from forcing it through and then releasing the source code.

Except the fact that he'll receive virtually no contributions from the community and thus he'll be limited to whatever can be done by himself and his employees. Also, community-controlled distros have set themselves up as gatekeepers, so most users never even discover software that the distros don't like.

I think Shuttleworth has identified the correct problem: We know how to get a large number of programmers to produce high-quality software (employ them) and we know how to get a large number of programmers to produce a large amount of software for free (the bazaar), but we don't know how to convince a large number of programmers to produce high-quality software for free.
I have never heard anyone ask about AI rights or free will/rationalizations to a politician.

What makes you think they get asked all the time?
Blogging has its share of muckrakers and trolls, but for me I'd say that it has opened up a medium in which I can follow a single train of thought over the course of a year even though I might have limited time to focus during any given day or week. I've been able to make minor contributions to a subject area that I had no skill with at the start, and I've made contact with several other like minded individuals that I never would have come across otherwise. Most importantly, if I was completely braindead on a certain point or if I was unaware of something painfully obvious, it was brought to my attention much earlier than it might have been had I continued by trial and error alone. The flames and the ridicule were not that bad, and ultimately blogging provided an arena where I could new try things: it was okay to "fail". There's not that much at stake in being an idiot in a blog post as long as you're willing to admit you were off base and correct stuff later.
37signals has been doing web applications for five years.

They're not some new startup who are building Ruby on Rails applications because it is the hot new technology.

They're building Ruby on Rails applications because they invented it. It is the hot new technology because of what they did, not vice versa.
Some schemers on #scheme on irc.freenode.net are toying with it I believe.
Replies to other comments ought to still be enabled, because threads don't always stay strictly true to the subject of the original post.

Otherwise, I think that's a pretty clever idea.
It looks to me like there too much info on the homepage, like explaining all ur features. Even your "about" is in the homepage itself.
Maybe you want to trim down the content on the homepage
Thank you dandelany :)

I think I fixed the .org problem. I will take a look at your viewport suggestion soon too.
Don't get carried away now. Razr is shit. Most other cellphones aren't that bad.
> Grad school.
This is not the first time I've seen you write something like this; so as a general question, how would one who hasn't had much involvement in academia (perhaps ever) get back into (perhaps into) academia?
Nonsense. You're talking about politicians jumping on a bandwagon that earned them cheap family values points, which is neither surprising, nor indicative of the attitudes of liberals in general.
Man, I'm normally not a spelling Nazi, and I follow his point and all, but "per say" really ruined this piece for me.
Fair enough, I'll settle for non-scientific.
At the risk of dissecting the comment, ruining it, I'm not trying to make an analogy. The point of my comment is that Dawkins' snowclone is not very telling when you can use it to suggest patent absurdities.

The point of Dawkins' "atheists just go one God farther" is that the difference between monotheists and atheists is one of degree, ie monotheists are skeptical but not skeptical enough. On the contrary, the difference is one of kind, two alien cultures that require some deep translation to speak to one another's concerns.
Scheme plotters
I guess my experience has been that balancing features against ship date is a product management function, with feature content dynamically recalculated (including scope reduction) during the development process in response to new information and opportunities. Figuring out the detailed project plan is a project management function. But one person may do both.
I went for a "normal" market, for all "normal" in the domain "speaks Spanish, but no English."
I've calmed down a bit now, so I don't want to belabor it any more. It seemed to me that you originally used the phrase "physical attributes" to refer to what most people would mean by it--height, weight, body fat ratio, skin color, bone density, sex organs, and so on. This is the official PC line on what the main (only?) difference between genders is, and it's an evil lie. If you really meant it in this (rather contrived, IMO) way that you've outlined just now, then I suppose we don't really disagree.
Funny, the two most common labels I am hearing these days are not on the list: 'liberal' and 'conservative'. In political discussions a lot of ideas are suppressed - or at least verbally dismissed - using these labels.
Is Your Program Perfect? Let Me Count The Ways.
I would imagine that the population of Lisp programmers who need a hand in learning Python is negligible compared to the other way around.
I'm still waiting for an actual complaint about an actual linux product that shows an inconsistent UI. KDE distros ship Konqueror on the Desktop, not Firefox, for example. Open Office is actually very gnome-centric, even if the widgets themselves are implemented with different code.

Your point seems to be that you can assemble an inconsistent, frankenstein environment using "linux" stuff. Well, duh. But you can do the same thing with OS X or Windows. The stuff that ships as a product from actual vendors (be they Apple, Red Hat, Novell, Canonical...) don't have the kinds of problems you're positing, and haven't for quite a few years now.
I do not want to be a rockstar - or a ninja . . . I stay away from those types of ads, although I probably should take a closer look as other posters have suggested.

If we are going to get into that naming territory, I think Wizard or Sourcerer (misspelling intended) are more appropriate . . . and Bounty Hunter, Gunfighter, Sniper, Commando, Surgeon, Evil Genius, Field Marshall, and Gladiator are still not quite as silly as rockstar

:)
Andale Mono for me. it's very "lightweight" and beautiful. i would use Courier New generally, but after using Andale, it's surprising how heavy and hard to parse Courier is
apply.
There was this terrific site a couple of centuries ago in internet time where you had to answer a question of a previous user, and then you could ask a question yourself, which in turn would be answered by a random person. All questions and answers were public, so this led to much hilarity.
There's a tax advantage too: to have investments that return $100,000 pa you need to have saved (assuming 10% ROI) $1,000,000. You get taxed each year on that $100,000 as income - but you also got taxed when you made that $1,000,000 in the first place.

But if you create a business that returns $100,000 pa, while you similarly get taxed on that income, you don't get taxed on the creation of the business - even though it's equivalent to having saved $1,000,000, in terms of its return.

And if that doesn't set your heart singing in transcendental joy, it's probably better for you to just do what you love and the money will follow. :-)
Why Facebook Connect Matters & Why It Will Win
Jon Hicks’s Design Iterations for the Silverback Mascot
I would argue that eugenics is a valid belief so long as there is at least one trait that 1) is desirable, or correlated with something desirable (e.g. resistance to a disease, stronger work ethic, lower criminality, resistance to sunburns) and 2) is heritable.

So I think I've got one! Skin color: people with darker skin are less likely to get sunburns, and darker skin appears to be heritable. So a smart eugenicist who believes that resistance to sunlight is an important trait would encourage darker-skinned people to breed more, at the expense of those of us with lighter hues.

I'm sure there are other examples. But given that humans are an evolved species, all I'm saying is that we might be able to outguess chance and know which traits could be useful down the road. In a country with a solid welfare system, the ability to delay gratification is a bad one for your future genes -- if you're busy going to school instead of having unprotected sex, you'll have fewer kids (and they'll have fewer kids, later in life, too). So maybe a eugenic policy would be to subsidize people who have kids above the replacement level after getting their degrees, or who get sterilized if they have a kid when neither parent is employed.
Inching toward federation
Full Text Of AOL Email: XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile And Bluestring To Shut Down
Feedback: color of header is set to orange by default. Should match header.
Nice list, pg.

I'd like to offer a few "extensions"; that is, words that appear to mean one thing, but really mean something else altogether. Probably fit neatly into the idea suppression category...

side effects
2 party system
best of breed
Department of Defense
early detection
diversity
Patriot Act
war on drugs
98% fat free
politically correct
national pasttime
news
right to life
choice
road rage
baby boomer
SUV
write your congressman
fast food
HMO
insurance
alternative music
higher education
affirmative action
moral majority
side dish
soft drink
cure
cofactor
cause
leading indicators
inalienable rights
with liberty and justice for all
sitcom
expert
talking head
preferred provider
copay
deductible
IRS
legal right of way
public servant
impartial
defense of marriage
just 2 ways to get to the destination, driving or taking a train ..
which is better ? well all depends on your taste, your feel or may be your mood!
Just do the way way your like it man!
and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so you can create custom languages that way

How does the author know what I will miss? Maybe he thinks that Python provides enough features to live without macros, but that's not necessarily true. Also, macros aren't just for "custom languages"; sometimes you need to make the details of your programming language (or API) go away for various reasons. Macros let you do that.

Anyway, I've found the lack of macros in other languages unsatisfying. I can use those languages, and I can build similarly-powerful abstractions... but they don't turn out the way I really want. So while it's certainly possible to work around the lack of macros, it would definitely be better to have them.
That post has very little to do with being an actual pilot. (I"m currently getting my pilot's license, so this post jumped at me)

I guess it's a cool exploration of air foils :shrug:

edit: ugh just noticed this is post is one of many spamming random blog posts ripped from some source.
Are you referring to the homepage when you are logged off? There are only three things on it... the about bubbles, activity, and a login box.

Also the blue bubbles at the top of the about page were actually designed for the homepage because we were trying to fix the "Uhh... what does Siafoo do exactly?" problem.

Maybe the bubbles should have less text and some graphic representation of what it does.
Haven't had a chance to download it yet, but it seems really close feature-wise to Screenflow from varasoftware.com, which we've used very successfully for usability testing recently. We were considering Morae initially, but Screenflow works with our Macs and ended up working out great. Plus, we really didn't need the extra analysis tools Morae offered anyway. I'll be interested to try this out now and see the differences now.
OP has obviously never dealt with Amazon Merchant Services, which has an automated email support system with x number of stock answers. It handles everything that could possibly go wrong...except for my problem.

Think about how illogical this is. They're saying, "We've thought of everything." Well, if you really did think of everything, then why do we even need support?

Sometimes you just gotta talk to a human about something not in your script. One customer of mine got so frustrated that he emailed Jeff Bezos, threatening to remove all his business. Funny thing, the phones worked pretty well the next day when 6 different managers called him back.