skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aside from programming and start-ups, right?

- Listening to college lectures on my i-Pod (variety of topics)

- Photography (especially HDR and low-light stuff)

- Muisc (keyboard, MIDI, synth)

- Blogging

- Traveling

- Reading

- Watching and participating in political discussions

- Hiking
Charming Python Articles
I may be wrong here . But given a choice of desktop application like Windows Live Writer(yeh windows only); many people would face a question? how does it matter using new web service?

In most of the cases I wont be pushing the same content to multiple blogs at once.

Sending mail is the simplest solution one can see though. Friendfeed-mailFF and now posterous. Also jason calacanis's shifting from blogging to email platform. its all 360 degree cycle.

Are we redefining how to blog ( by mailing either through posterous/way jason calacanis done having exclusive mailing list)?

oops everything is getting redefined
All About Python and Unicode
yes... i hve checked out http://www.purpletrail.com and the site is pretty neat with some great features... i guess worth giving a try... and it also has desktop and mobile... abilities
Is every petty crime a new story? It is when Craigslist is involved
Don't forget you also have a meta-vote: you choose which sites to patronize. When and if the posts on the front page no longer match your interests, it's time to walk away and let the tragedy of the commons play out the third act.

I agree that it is very annoying not to be able to hide comments. I hope there is some incredibly important reason for this. Maybe it is explicitly to foster the kind of comment you made, to goad people into taking action when the quality of articles drops rather than tolerating dreck and linkbait by ignoring it?
I'm not sure who is the market for this, people who want to post the same content on multiple blogs?

Why do they do that? I mean, I have one blog and I post on it. Seven blogs with the same stuff would be crazy. Is RSS so obscure that I have to go around to every community I'm a part of to push my content out to them?

Cool that the users like it - that's all that matters. Could be game-changing for those who participate in multiple communities, right?

I think I get it. Still not sure. Of course, I'm still working on why twitter makes any sense at all. "I'm thinking of going to I-hop" "Scratched my nose just now""Look! A butterfly."

feh
Misuse of the word "hacker", although nmap is a nice piece of software. I don't really look up to people who steal some stuff online and go to jail, though. Not that exciting.
"I'm not sure who is the market for this, people who want to post the same content on multiple blogs?"

Spammers?
Very informative article. Even most of the comments here provide good insight into the matter. I, for one, would surely pause for a few seconds from now on before submitting comments.
Media face web censorship at Beijing Olympics
Vi is for whimps
What about having an option to not post it on Posterous? I know it seems somewhat counter intuitive to the interests of Posterous, but the email "interface" is so much better than most of what's out there for simple posts.

I imagine only a minority of users will not have these type of posts sent to Posterous. Additionally, once you're able to have Posterous on your own domain, many users will make the switch entirely.
Exactly. Todo lists are just flat files :) I use ~/TODO for this purpose.

I discovered this by trying to write my own TODO manager:

http://git.jrock.us/?p=doqueue.git;a=summary

After working on that for a while, I realized I just wanted a flat file :) Implementing the file was much faster than writing an entire application, I might add.

When I get some interest in working on this again, though, I will make a FUSE filesystem that gets the information from the web and makes a TODO file for you. Then you can use the web interface when you're at a different computer (or you want to share TODOs with a friend), and the file otherwise. It might be interesting.
Cat powered
Unicycling, juggling: Very geeky and still impresses 'normal' people. In contrast to math - another hobby of mine.

Board games are nice as well.
Excellent article. One of the clearest explanation of how to use unicode in python that I have seen yet.
I'm not sure where you got your information, but the TV and Mac Mini can both display 1080p. And the mini can decode 1080p h264 video without breaking a sweat - even a core duo 1.83 has no issues there.
29 is not a "late bloomer" for a novelist. That's considered somewhat precocious, actually.
this is good to know - thanks - just wondering whether paypal offers automated sales tax calculations and shipping calc?
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/
Ask HN: Realtime video encoding: how to?
I am thinking over an idea of adding realtime video streaming to an application. I.e. I want a desktop user working with an application to be able to start transmitting a video stream of what he's doing (whole desktop or window) to other interested users.

What kind of CPU power and bandwith will be needed for this? Or, what qind of quality is possible with todays CPU power?

What are the obstacles to doing this that you can see?

Are there any applications that do this already?
Closer still:
http://www.joshmillard.com/garkov/
Ribbit investor talks about good returns, bad markets and ‘Communication 2.0′
KDE 4.1 delivers the next-gen desktop experience
Ask YC: Apple iPhone development - help needed
Hi All,

I would like to start iPhone development with no prior knowledge to developing app's on Apple or iPhone. What is the first thing I should start learning?

Currently do a little work in Ruby but not sure where to start i.e Objective C, Xcode etc....

Thanks in advance for your help.
#!/usr/bin/python

####################################
# Curmudgeon_Article_Generator.py #
####################################

import random

i=[ "C", "Ada", "Assembler", "Fortran", "lisp", "binary programming with patch cords", "time sharing mainframes",
"by dropping off punch cards and wait two days for the output", "butterflies", "a magnetized needle and hard disk platters",
"C++", "C#", "Python", "Ruby", "Django", "Ruby on Rails", "Cobol on Cogs", "Scheme", "Smalltalk", "Haskell", "Erlang",
"Distributed Systems", "Parallel algorithms", "network programming", "Win32 API's", ".NET", "Perl", "Unix", "Windows 95",
"Windows Vista", "GUI's", "VAX command line", "vacuum tubes and a sodering iron", "an abacus", "clay tablets",
"wire, duct tape and spit", "transistors", "slide rules", "microcomputers with 5 1/2 inch floppies", "machine language", "a PDP 10"]

for x in range(20):
print "\nKids today don't know squat about programming."
print "Why when I was that age, we didn't have %s." % random.choice(i)
print "We learned programming the hard way, using %s!" % random.choice(i)
print "Boy, am I ever grateful."
It's not the size of the index, it's how you use it.
Don't Call It Blogging
SplashTop instant-on OS hacked to run other programs, boot off flash drives
The site sounds like whoever wrote the text is not a native english speaker. You must get a native english speaker to rewrite these for you...
Oh look, another mainstream news article about how the newest generation "just doesn't get it." Silly 20-somethings.
Would have been better without the rant. That is, if the author had just concentrated on exposing the bad science.
Supercoder.jpg
Those numbers do look a little funny, 22 seconds seems way to high for Ruby 1.8, on my macbook 2.6Ghz it's around 3.2 secs.

Out of curiosity, what were you doing that made your SBCL numbers so high? I've got 1.8.6 (running natively on OSX) clocked at 1.3 seconds and SBCL (linux on VMWare) at 78 ms.

(These times are with the random number generation removed, with them the SBCL time jumps to 90ms and 1.8.6 jumps to 4 seconds).
Download Burn Notice Comrades
Introduced by Nate, Michael helps a Russian woman named Katya whose sister was smuggled into the U.S. by gangsters. However, Katya cannot afford their extortionate demands and her sister is being held captive.
The cylinder only fits in the circular hole.

You can't assume that you always have a cylinder or a cube to fit into the mold. Heck, you may end up with an icosidigon and have only a triangle to try to shove it into.

As amazing as the Y Combinator idea may sound to some, you also have to have a healthy sense of skepticism and apply it appropriately to every situation and oppourtunity that comes your way. Make it work for you, not you for it.
Reading rms's posts
Artists.
Musicians.
Anyone who is organizing a group of volunteers who check different blogs.
Anyone organizing a party or group outing with a bunch of friends (who won't all have one of those).

I can see a lot of legitimate uses.
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/349/
Cloud Computing and Networking Vendors: The Third Option
1. Hacker News

2. Bridge (I wonder why more hackers don't play; it's the perfect game for us.)

3. Foosball

4. Boggle

5. Eating, drinking, & traveling with friends & family

6. The Pittsburgh Steelers

7. Drinking beer, preferably along with one of the 6 above

8. Fitness/diet (when I'm not doing #7 above)
Compare Avogadro's constant.
All phones codes
Process trolls can infect any organization...
The Economics of Testing Ugly Code
XML's co-author Tim Bray argues that it's no longer good enough to be a one-language shop.
Escaping the Mentality of a Coder
Know Something
Airtel Free MMS
Board games, computer games, sci-fi.

Geek stuff :-)
Briton designs car that folds in half
I predict it's going to suck as much as Windows XP (maybe not as much as Windows ME)
Yeah, sarcasm is cool.
Open Web Foundation to Keep Data 'Open'
Ask YC: On Cuil
I know this has probably been over debated lately. Everyone's saying the Cuil is a fail as a search engine. Am I the only one that noticed the detail that it seems to bring more results the more specific is the query?

I mean, I've read on a blog somewhere that Cuil doesn't bring any results for "Cobol". They even had a link. And it's true, it doesn't, BUT they offer those tabs with more specific queries like "cobol compiler", "cobol jobs" and such. And they DO bring results. While I don't know cobol and am unable to assert the relevance of the results, I am biased to believe that we've been using Cuil wrongly.

People have been wanting so badly for someone to beat Google at being Google that they pick very candidate and try to use it like they use Google. And this new search engine is bringing something new to us, a new way of search, and we are so locked into and used to the "way of Google" that we are blocking ourselves from trying new ways of doing things.

We are coders. We all know how is it like when we move from one language to another that has a totally different way of doing things. We complain, we curse, we swear to go back to our old language, but we bear it and then we 'get it'. And when we get it we can see the advantages, the disadvantages and understand when use one and when use other.

Maybe we should first try to learn the 'way of Cuil' before we dismiss it as another failure? I don't know, am I sounding too weird, or does it click into someone else like it did on me?
I reckon this is more comparable to the Ruby version:

from random import Random
from threading import Thread
rand = Random().random
THREADS, SIZE = 20, 100000
threads = []

class Test(Thread):
def __init__ (self):
Thread.__init__(self)
def run(self):
a = [rand()*SIZE for x in xrange(SIZE)]
a.sort()

def test():
for i in xrange(THREADS):
t = Test()
threads.append(t)
t.start()
for t in threads :
if t.isAlive() :
t.join()

if __name__=='__main__':
from timeit import Timer
t = Timer("test()", "from __main__ import test")
print "%.2f sec/pass" % (t.timeit(number=10)/10)

Which results in 5.48 sec/pass

Looking at cProfile, 50 or so calls to built-in method acquire takes an avg. 4.102 sec.
Luxury Real Estate in Las Vegas, NV & Henderson, NV
Luxury homes and estates require considerable time as well as specially designed marketing programs in order to attract buyers. This is mainly due to the number of buyers capable of purchasing high priced real estate. Any real estate agent would be privileged to list and sell a multi million dollar property, however; not every agent has the experience combined with the techniques to do so successfully.
Search up "skyhook" for information on the program that's indexed wifi hotspots for a rather ominous hybrid geolocation system; and zoom in on cities in google map view for the general contours of large buildings, which is pretty useful.
1. Miniature Wargaming

2. Reading

3. Playing the Piano

4. Traveling

5. Trekking
Careful analysis of this post's score will answer your question for you.
Yeah, but it leaves out one important bit that I've never been able to figure out. How do you use print to output a UTF-8 or some other Unicode encoding w/o using the repr() call?
Start with the sample apps provided by Apple. Read their intro to Objective-C.
Bad Science? Yes. Bad Marketing? No.
Yahoo BOSS Should Capitalize On Cuil Damp Squib Launch
What is Ruby Enterprise?
On "new news:"

I'm not concerned about how the newspapers and producers like MSNBC and Washington Post create the story. The main problem is how do the search engine or whatever can search that news. The problem with Google News is that google is crawling and indexing all the webpage news like it was a webpage and it is not very up to date. If there was a fire right now, you won't see that in google right now. On the other hand, RSS is a different topic. First of all not all news producers have RSS. My main question is, if there is a flooding happening right now, what is the best way to find that information. You can't use google now, because they haven't crawled and indexed it. I'm thinking of news search/aggregator realtime. Another nice thing would be if I search "flooding" it should display many news sources so that I can get some perspective. What is the best way to approach this problem. Crawling and indexing is not the way to go I think if it is needed to be instant.
It sounds like this guy has a problem with his current/former employer(s) more than anything.
Agreed. Although there has been a considerable amount of "unsuitable" material make it to the front page of HN, there has also been a lot of pointless citation of this unsuitable material - to the degree that it dominates constructive dialog taking place.

HN is changing, no doubt, but as has been pointed out time and time again on HN, if it is of interest to the community at large, it belongs. The community is changing (undeniable) but, maybe it is that sometimes posts other than an amazing O(N) bubble sort are also of interest...

I, for one, enjoy chuckling at XKCD - typically I just go there myself (without the aid of a social bookmark site!), but perhaps this one is just relevant enough to make it on HN... Or maybe I am wrong.
"The way C handles pointers was a brilliant innovation." (1993 Knuth interview)
Instead of "believing", it's pretty easy to look up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

Started in 1969. Even Multics wasn't started until 1964.
Microsoft bets on cloud computing as Amazon suffers outage
Anyone try searching Cuil.com for Paul Graham?
The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear
So in summary: don't write ugly code, because once you do it's permanent.
Apple's cult of secrecy begins to bug its developers
9 Common Reasons A Website Is Not Drawing Visitors
It seems to me though that posting something like XKCD is simply for getting Karma. It's not like the people who read it don't already check every monday,wednesday and friday morning... or is that just me?
I think this is great. Very valuable feature that puts them a bit past tumblr in one sense. I like that they're not all about competition, and are giving users tools they want to be happy.
New Alzheimer's drug slows cognitive decline 81% in trials
I wonder if debian will unfreeze in order to get this in. I really hope so. I even think it's worth delaying the release for a month in order to do so.
Download Burn Notice: “Trust Me” Episode
Whooo damn, that was fun! Mike asked me to talk to y’all about tonight’s episode while he’s off eatin’ some chicken tikka with his new buddy Wasim, so let me tell you a little about myself. Name’s Davis Cullen. Daddy made his money in oil, but ain’t no way I’m livin’ like that. Up at four, in bed by nine. No, siree. I told him, “I don’t want your life” right before I left Texas. Lucky daddy’s always had a soft spot for me so I got a nice fat trust fund.
Hmmn, photography seems to be popular. I do food/travel photography:

http://joshwand.com/food/ (though I actually make some money on this, so don't know if it qualifies as a hobby)

Flight Simulation (X-Plane)

Cooking (I've taken up real BBQ lately)

Eating (see: http://lunchmapr.com (due for a big refactor))

Gardening

Learning Mandarin
They've also added some great new features to the apis: http://developer.ribbit.com/blog/?p=105
I love the extra commentary when hovering over the image. It's quite often the funniest/most intriguing part of the comic.
I'd always used paper & pencil, but the big problem with that was that my TODO list would get long & intimidating and I'd rather just ignore it. This keeps things manageable for me.

Also, I find it useful for those long-term backburnered tasks that I work on when I've got nothing else to do, but aren't immediately relevant to whatever I'm doing now. If I tried keeping those by paper & pencil, I'd end up losing the list by the time I got around to them.
Green light for hacker’s extradition
Paul:
Great ideas all. Might I suggest you look at a hybrid spawned from 13/14; that is online learning and performance measurement. This issues are both synergistic and antagonistic. Having spent half my career in schools and the rest in corporate education, I have some insights I'd like to share with an eye towards creating an initiative worth considering.

Contact me directly at rshadrin@thinktopia.us and 845 788 4180.
The HN aim used to be set above "popular".
Swing dancing (lindy hop),
Playing the piano/keyboard,
Reading libertarian articles.
I disagree, it is bad marketing because Microsoft is hitting the wrong market.

The people who make their decisions based on what Dell defaults to are going to end up with Vista - because that is their only option now. There was a time when they had a choice between XP or Vista with a new computer, now you have a choice between Vista or no computer.

So this campaign is aimed at the people who actually make an informed decision and influence large purchases - basically IT guys since businesses are the ones still using XP/2000. Insulting their intelligence is not an effective strategy.
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but I'm saying it: can anything exciting happen in the computer industry without Microsoft coming in and expecting people to pay for mediocrity?
Basing it on another OS would negate one of the key aspects of their strategy - making it difficult to migrate software from their OS. Microsoft only wins if its body of software is Windows-specific and if porting or making it less-specific is a pain.
How so? The HN front page is designed to only show the most recent, most popular articles.
Glad you are a Hacker News fan, but the Steelers Suck.
ProtoChart: Prototype + Canvas = Pretty Charts
Dude, your site just made me so hungry.
-Mountain Biking
-following the Startup Scene
-following the Cleveland Browns
-Going to the Beach
I'm going to start with the assumption that you're already covered on the technical side of things (from looking at the other comments in this thread, they have it covered).

The people side of an interview is often overlooked when advice is being given.

How are your speaking skills? It's important that you don't answer every question with a hundred "ums" and "uhs" mixed in.

People want to work with people who seem confident with what they know. If you do have an umming and ahhing habit, I would suggest recording yourself speaking about a random topic you've picked from a hat (or otherwise randomized) and keep doing it until you can consciously stop your self from doing it.

This is the number one problem I see with new graduates - they may be smart as hell, but they interview terribly.

Some other things that always makes an interviewee stick out in my mind:

- An interviewee who asks questions.

- Someone who takes notes when we talk about problems.

- Someone who can answer the question "why do you want to work here".

Good luck!
Either that or people have felt pain when installing Linux before.
Alexa is disgustingly inaccurate. I would trust an obvious screen shot of Google Analytics (including a flaw, making it authentic) over an Alexa rating any day.

Did you see this? http://nowdothis.tumblr.com/post/44066616/synchronicity
You missed a very important point: What makes it permanent (or at least provides much of the inertia) is the risk of reintroducing old bugs and not wanting to manually test all over again. Automated testing does not have this problem.

In practice, of course, this depends on how badly the testing framework is entangled with implementation details, rather than testing via a public interface. If making changes means having to rewrite 90% of your automated tests, you haven't gained much.

(The article has a couple other potential threads in it, as well, but that seems like the main idea to me.)
Interesting. I'm not entirely sure how well the argument holds, but it does put forward some interesting points.

One of the weaker aspects of this article is that the author doesn't define "value". I'll take a stab at it: for a business, the value of its software is how much money it can make or save from it. There are two components to this value, an immediate, obvious one ("can we sell/use it tomorrow?") and a long term, less obvious one ("can we still sell/use it in two year's time?").

The graphs and explanations, I think, apply fairly well to the "immediate value", but less so to the long-term value. The long-term value of code you can keep evolving, cheaply, to meet user demands for years, is much greater than that of ugly code that will become a viscous nightmare within a few months. Immediate value is very important too, but generally is focused on at the expense of long-term value, particularly by non-developers, who aren't fully aware that code can reach a point where it's so nasty that the only solution is a bullet to the head and a rewrite.

So I think the problem is more one of making the long-term value of beautiful code clearer, rather than one of flattening spikes. The curve to the right of the spike rises much faster and much higher than in the graphs, and it's worth moving there if you have people who are capable of it.
As the comments on the article point out, this article makes many sweeping generalisations without much substantiation. It's not really worth replying in more detail other than saying that I believe he's dead wrong on most of his points.
How many computers should a programmer have?
Time to change strategy then?

You can lock in users via incompatibility and an inferior product... but Apple tried that back in the 90's with not much luck.
Obama or Osama bin Laden? | TechJaws
OPEC 2.0: Bandwidth is the New Oil
1. Coding (it's a hobby too!)

2. Music (piano/keyboard/vocal)

3. Arguing (politics/economics)

4. Reading (to support #3)
The Mozilla CEO on His Firefox Strategy, His Google Gambit, and Working With Apple
http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/

It is a small number of patches to the base MRI to enable better use of shared memory for forked processes, on operating systems that use copy-on-write semantics for fork. In particular, this optimization is exploited in the Phusion Passenger product that the same developers created. Phusion Passenger is kind of like mod_wsgi but using different process management.

It seems the developers are also trying to offer a higher level of support than is available for the base MRI. For example, they backported the recent security patches to an older version than the MRI developers were willing to do.
why these things never work on IE?