skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a rather horrifying prospect, isn't it?
"Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn't do. This goes for customers ('fill out these twenty-five fields of personal information to get an account for our website')"

Right... because Facebook doesn't have that many fields that people can fill out. And information directories don't either.

Ok, some of this is decent advice, but way too broad. You cannot apply some of this to every situation, which is why I tend to dislike generalizations in the first place.
As the author points out, a significant fraction of folks who learn languages with monads end up writing a monad tutorial.

What other language features (any language) trigger such behavior?

What does this behavior tell us about monads and/or such languages?
you presume I haven't read Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes because I've drawn different conclusions than you? How about Burke and Goethe? Spinoza, Hume and Kant? I can fallaciously appeal to authority too, just because I've read all of these writers doesn't mean I can pass off the onus of thinking on them. I see many of the problems in today's society as going directly back to flaws in enlightenment era ideas about government. And why would you call me a slow Marxist? I hate collectivism, are my posts coming off as anti-corporate just because I called the government one? Assuredly the government is a poorly run corporation but that doesn't mean I'm inditing corporations in general.

And it's not a metaphor, I'm saying that government is literally the same as a corporation. The American government is a corporation whose assets are the land between the atlantic and pacific and bordered by canada and mexico. In payment for the use of this land, every person tithes a percentage of any value they earn/create. People also agree to abide by certain rules of conduct. seems all very straightforward to me. No need to invent some special privileges that government is magically imbued with that a corporation wouldn't have.

Think of it this way, if a corporation decided that it would be in its best interests to start operating off of an island in international waters wouldn't the corporation need to defend its holdings with military force and do its own policing?

The idea that government has some sort of mystical, moral, or intrinsic "right" to run things is nonsense. It's just a group of people who by various means, legal, military, or otherwise have gained the ability to determine what happens on a specific tract of land. That they then set up a school system by which people are taught that they do have a moral, mystical, or intrinsic right to run the place should not be surprising.

The fact that corporations have a clear motive and government does not is part of my problem with government. What the hell is purpose of government? If the purpose of government is just to provide security, enforce contracts, keep foreigners at bay, and otherwise provide a stable environment in which people can conduct private business then the U.S. government is doing a piss poor job and ought to be fired.

Do you know what the U.S. is trying to do? because the system by which it arrives at decisions about what to do seems pretty damn opaque to me. It's certainly not public opinion, but nor is it dictatorship since as far as I can see the man supposedly in charge can't hire or fire people, can't affect major policies, can't decide the budget or any other useful thing.
Is F8 being used for phishing?
You make it sound like Geo-Django was written in lieu of working on other features. Geo-Django is a contrib app and was championed by Justin Bronn who isn't a core contributor. It was included because it's very helpful to some people and if you ever need GIS stuff you'll be thankful to Justin. If you don't need it you'll notice nothing different--don't import anything inside of django.contrib.gis and you won't even experience feature bloat. Most people don't use all of the contrib apps on every site, but it's nice that they are there when you need them.
also: try reading some history firsthand instead of second third and fourth.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/03/corporate-origins-o...

check out the links to things like the actual charters of states.
I definitely think so.
This isn't the first time I've wanted to embed simple forums that easily integrate into a login system I already have in place in the site. I don't want to have to hack up phpBB or anything like that - phpBB is a bit bloated anyways imho. Usually I just want them to provide community support in small projects I work on that already have login systems.

My only suggestion is to make them easy to integrate into a premade login system, and not overly bloated.
Do you suppose there's a sort of reverse Conway's Law for version control? Compared to most DVCSs, SVN maked merging branches expensive and required more decisions about the code to be made ahead of time. Gridlock happens, and branches can languish if they haven't been planned properly and agreed to from the outset. Sounds a bit like some of the things that have been said about Django's roadmap and central planning, no? (And the documentation support is excellent as well, for both Django and SVN.)
creativity seems to be a word with no referent. what we really seem to mean by creativity is non-obvious solutions to complex problems arrived at by unknown means.
it's quite amusing that "do" and "don't" can be switched in that first question and the meaning is the same.
In a nutshell, FTA:

* People are using 1970s-era languages

* The "Design Patterns" solution is to turn the programmer into a fancy macro processor
Floats/decimals in javascript
Really seems that Ning was genuinely threatened by what widgetlaboratory was supplying on their site. A lot of sites on Ning relied on them and widget labs response was very much justified given the context of the situation(thousands of users unable to use the site they built because core functionalities are gone).
Apparently because Jeff Atwood complains about it occasionally. Also, because it's the only popular language that doesn't consider "magic" a good thing.
I was under the impression that ratpoison was considered a tiling WM.
Oh, there is a bottom. There is definitely a bottom to the abyss.

The question is, can you calculate the length of the abyss based on the time it takes for your screams to reach the surface?
Doesn't mean I haven't read about patterns, or pieces of the GoF book (which I have; and I'm reading the book itself right now). That would be like saying you can't credibly talk about graphics unless you've read the white book: it simply isn't so.
My Common Lisp environment is not built on top of C.

What is it built on top of? Your environment is not based on Unix, Mac OS, or Windows? I thought Lisp Machines were part of history.
F8 = FB = facebook?
When the article says that $0.99 is the most popular price, it means popular in number of apps, not in number of downloads:
http://www.pinchmedia.com/percentage-of-free-applications-de...
check out upcoming...
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/search/?type=events&rt=1&q...

Maybe the 2008 International Aerospace Art Exhibition?
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1024661/
Definitely buy it. I played some of the purchased content this week. Seems worth it because the gameplay changes and twists so much throughout.
The game's storyline involves a protagonist who recently made some mistakes and broke up with his "princess", and needs to change some things in the past to fix this.

My guess is that this "fantasy" storyline is autobiographical. The dude probably had a bad breakup and got over it by sitting in his basement for 3 years making a great game. I feel like drugs may have played a small part in the design as well.
Actually, you're right, I wasn't specific enough. Automatically tiling window managers, sorry. Ratpoison breaks windows up into non-overlapping tiles, but it doesn't (by default) automatically manage their placement anymore than screen does. Opening up a new terminal (or whatever) covers the previously active one.

The WMs I'm talking about automatically place windows into various layouts, such as "master window on one side, other windows stacked vertically on the other side", current window full-screen, current window floating with mouse-drag-based move and resize, etc.

In dwm or wmii you can tag windows arbitrarily, and each tag works as a separate workspace. Whenever you switch tags or add/remove a window, the others are repositioned according to the current layout rule. In practice, I often do things like run emacs on its own tag, but also on a tag shared with a pdf or something I'm referencing. Workspace #8 is emacs, #4 is split emacs+pdf+screen, etc. You just specify which windows to group together and it does the rest, usually needing little intervention.

You can add this sort of fast grouping behavior to ratpoison via scripting (and the scripting interface for it is pretty good), but it doesn't try to do this by default. Its priority is on avoiding the mouse, rather than avoiding manual window placement in general. The latter indirectly leads to an interface with less mouse use anyway, though, since you seldom spend time clicking to focus on, move, or resize windows except with programs that are too awkward to use in tiles.

This has less and less to do with screen, though.
This article tends to define creativity as 'something that entertains humans' which is in my view a seriously flawed perspective.

A bird call would entertain another bird more than the greatest music ever written. Human attempts at imitating the bird call are probably at best derivative and usually nonsensical. So from a bird's perspective, humans could be regarded as less creative than birds. Similarly, judging an AI system's creativity by something inherently human as art or literature is to use an unfair measuring stick.

P.S. Actually I don't really know what the state of the art is in bird call simulation is but you get the point right.
Yeah, you just kind of have to have the attitude that you're searching for a diamond in the rough going in. I may buy that one as well.

Check out J Paul Getty's How To Be Rich, which is both about how to attain wealth and what to do once you succeed. Pretty awesome really.
The message/theme of this book is timeless. I hope my children (not yet conceived) will read it, and their children too.

There will never be a shortage of youth that are lost/confused and at the same time coming of age.

Some argue that we should forgo teaching children the classics because newer, somehow more relevant literature with the same message is now available. The point of reading the classics is that these things are timeless, and so reading the work of the first person to write about a certain topic in depth is like reading a primary source. In other words, it should be encouraged in academia.
video of game:
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/braid/video/6194163/b...
I think the goal of school is supposed to be to teach children how to evaluate which actions will be most beneficial to them. What school actually teaches is how to be dishonest/illogical in all the correct ways for a given society.
Maybe because their business model wasn't built entirely on being in the good graces of another company. Gates would have creamed his pants if he could legally turn off an app with the flick of a switch.
F8 is Facebook's (FB) developer platform. The intent was to question if F8 opened a hole for phishers / spammers.
Huh. I was thinking the problem with so many "entrepreneurship" programs is that they produce few actual entrepreneurs.
You are wrong about the article. It explicitly mentions that human activities are "nowhere near the whole story" and that even primitive organisms can be considered creative. The statement "creating something new or being original is an essential part of creativity" is the only one used to explain what creativity is, and to explain this particular problem.

The problem in question affects all systems, whether they are human-like or not.
There are also neural networks that have created patentable inventions. One of them is mentioned in the article.
Thanks. Added to the list for the next Amazon purchase.

Somebody should do a meta-book on success/self-help literature. I guess it started with "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill? I dunno, but there's a boatload of it out there.
Sounds like a model that reinforced his/her preconceived ideas of racing to a finish line! After all, what else are computer models :)
On the long term value of the internet
Firefox to pass Internet Explorer (IE) in May 2009?
F8 is Facebook's developer conference, not their platform. Their platform, surprisingly enough, is called Facebook Platform.
Ask YC: I am learning morse code
I am learning morse code these days, listening dit-dah gives me a wonderful feeling. If you are interested in learning it, you may find following userful:

http://c2.com/morse/
http://code.google.com/p/kochmorse/

I've heard that morse code is faster than messaging with a cell phone. I wonder if we can get more from this old technology. What do you think about it?
Space junkies ask 'who owns the moon?'
Google Down
http://www.google.com

Not loading.
I pinged it. Didn't work.
Asked a friend. True for her too.
Is this a sign of the apocalypse?

It seems to be back. But it really was down for a few minutes.
Never seen Google down before
Comparing Yahoo Buzz and Digg After Hitting Buzz’s Homepage
Facebook Mail Spam and/or Viruses - I’m Getting Tons
The Million Dollar a Month Facebook Application
How to Fold Paper in Half Twelve Times: An "Impossible Challenge" Solved and Explained
10 Free Python Programming Books
Ruby best practice patterns, by Rein Henrichs
Why We Fail To See When We're About To Fail
Arguing that Catcher in the Rye is obsolete because it no longer holds the shock value it once did is like arguing we should stop reading Shakespeare because nobody talks that way anymore. Good literature is good literature.

Plus Holden is hilarious. Everybody else is a phony.
The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less
5 ways to Update Windows Drivers
Most of PC user face the problem that their notebook become slower and slower as time goes by. To speed up your PC yiu have to update your drivers. But most of us don,t know which one to update and from where. So today we are here posting 5 [...] Continue Reading…
I don't think it's really an argument for removing CitR, but rather a dramatically-titled article that basically states that the book has retired. It's not getting frayed edges - it's dusty. The young individuals it was initially meant to influence have grown up and are part of the AARP.

I have no doubt that Trubek feels CitR can (and should) be taught as a classic like David Copperfield. But it's ironic to expect teachers to ignore the new literature of the next 50 years. Trubek has engaged in a common exercise by offering new options, with an edge, that demonstrate that classics are being written today - just like CitR was for the 60s.

I vote for Battle Royale, but Trubek's list isn't bad... =)
Things are deemed "timeless" when people keep reading them over the generations. And your argument for why they should read them in the first place is that they're "timeless". That's circular.

As for "primary source", that's if you treat ideas as historical artifacts. If you're actually interested in the ideas themselves, a more apt metaphor would be learning obsolete technology. This is sometimes good, but not often. For example, I recently learned how Intel 8080 works, because I wanted to know more about how CPUs work, and modern ones were too complicated for me.
Understandable that people take rejection personally. Having visited the site in question though, I don't think it reflects negatively on the investor to have passed. I would not have invested in it either.

If the story reflects negatively on anyone, it is the two colleagues, who presumably buttered up these kids and then used Guy's obvious dissatisfaction (why is my time being wasted by all of you???) to avoid having to disappoint them personally.
Ask YC: What's your day job?
I'm interested in what day jobs hackers on here have? I'd like to see what the mix of people working IT related jobs with side projects vs non IT related jobs with side projects. IT being the usual admin, developer and designer type positions.
And its always interesting in general to see what other people do for a living.
The Economics of Pay Incentives: a 116% Productivity increase
I have a hard time understanding which kind of IT person this article is referring to. Does it mean the kind of person who uses full blown J2EE for a simple data-driven Intranet app that will only ever have 5 users and spends weeks drawing UML diagrams/writing useless specs before writing code? I certainly hope that kind of person becomes obsolete.
i wouldnt use hdfs just for added reliability, you could soft raid for that. but if you are working on any map/reduce type problems hadoop is a great way to go.

ive been saying it for a long time now, but damn... it's such a great time to be a developer.
I've always wondered about the dollar value of Yahoo's most obvious liability: The name "Yahoo". Perhaps the Japanese don't translate this into "Stupid Idiot".
If you're wondering whether to read this, or if the article is as banal as the headline suggests: it's the latter.
Hopefully no one will ever own the internet platform, but we know it could happen.
Think of it this way: Whilst I'm creating inertia, what are the units that I will use to measure the quantity produced?
EveryBlock doesn't use GeoDjango.
Here's the real problem with entrepreneurship classes -- What's the point? People who take an entrepreneurship class are missing the point -- they're probably better off either taking more engineering classes so they can build something people want, OR taking that time and effort and actually working on something real.

I was president of an entrepreneurship society in college. It was great. I met a lot of great entrepreneurs, spent a lot of time THINKING about entrepreneurship, and met a lot of great people from it. But even today I kick myself... because if only I had spent all those untold hours on an actual startup instead, then who knows where I'd be now instead.

Reading/learning/thinking about entrepreneurship is meaningless and useless until you DO it.
This is an attitude that we're very keen on discouraging - if you look at the schedule for DjangoCon we've deliberately included talks about Django's deficiencies: Cal Henderson on "Why I hate Django" and Mark Ramm on "A Turbogears guy on what Django should learn from Zope."
I imagine part of the problem here is that most of the work on 1.0 is being done at in-person sprints. Anyone can attend these, but if you aren't there you miss out on the discussions about what's being worked on and what's ready to merge in to trunk. Because the work is being done in one place, there's less published communication about it on the mailing lists.

The up-side of the sprints is that they're incredibly productive, as you can see by looking at the amount of high quality checkins they generate.
I was making the point that the platitudes that come out of the mouths of many pundits are straight from the first day's class.
What I am reading right now: http://www.happinesshypothesis.com/ . Why go this additional step of getting rich - if all you need is to be happy?
The article doesn't suggest any books to replace Catcher in the Rye. I would probably suggest "Drown" by Junot Diaz:

http://www.amazon.com/Drown-Junot-D%C3%ADaz/dp/1573226068

But Catcher in the Rye is a great and captivating story in its own right and doesn't really need to be replaced... though it would be great if schools taught edgier fiction these days.
Someone has to look after the children, yes? I started off by writing a lament about my own school days, and how much I loved summer, and how much time was wasted, etc. But then I realized...my mother had to work a day job, and I was an asshole even as a child. Should she have to deal with me 24 hours a day while making a living? Is that possible...?

Is it not more efficent to allow an institution to babysit children rather than working parents? It's a matter of cost/benefits like anything else.

Still, I wish I could really "drop out" from it all. The article reminds me of that fact. I spend 3 dollars/day on food and every other penny goes to shining my prison walls.
Free/CC-licensed legal documents? (Privacy policy/TOS)
So... you have a cool website with stuff. How do you go about not getting sued? We (wejoinin.com), want a privacy policy/TOS to keep us out of trouble, and were wondering if there were freely available legal documents. What say you?
no day job here... "all in."
Nice article.

I got to experience user testing through participation in testing gigs found on craigslist.

Great way to make a few bucks while learning something new :)
Consulting and contracting, with a variety of technologies. My profile has links to my pages, which have this information in more detail. Does yours?
I'm a networking systems engineer but my heart is in software development. I've developed small programs to assist my day to day tasks, take part in open source projects, have written a blog or two to discuss technology as I see it and my book reading list is endless. In a year or two I see myself transitioning into the software side of the company after acquiring my degree and having some of those side projects to showcase what I can do. I guess I could say that I am currently and primarily a systems hacker by day-job, and software hacker by hobby with the goal of making it a profession.

Asking a question is great on HN, but you should preface it with your answer to your own question... not a hard and fast rule obviously, but for questions like this it would certainly be nice to hear about what you do too. :)
Why people hate Java?
In my opinion Java is good language. I cannot understand people here and on reddit blaming Java often without reason.
Because Java sucks ;)
Related pages widget shown on Wikipedia using Directed Edge engine
Your opinion based on what? How many years experience do you have, how many different languages do you know, how many different kinds of languages (imperative, declarative, functional), how many have you used to build real working production applications? The latter is all that counts as "experience" really.

Java is disliked because it is the lowest common denominator and employers tend to over-estimate the value of doing everything in the same language and under-estimate the value of using an appropriate language for the problem domain. So there are an awful lot of people whose professional experience is telling them that another tool is right for the job, but they've got to hit that screw with a hammer anyway.
Teaches you how to cheat and get away with it. How to act like you are doing something but not really; how to get others to do your work for you; etc...