skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, but you can extend that logic to other software, and in general the tradeoffs are very similar. Photoshop vs GIMP, MS Office vs Libreoffice, Scribus vs InDesign. It adds up after awhile.

You don't have to switch to linux to take advantage of free software, but it's usually easier and regardless, many of the Linux issues raised in the original article apply to the FOSS alternatives as well.
Technology is also a sociological concept, it is in the minds of the people, it is not merely the products such as blades and core i7s. All those products of technology are the result of a specific culture, it is the result of specific societies and the interaction and relationships that people have with each other. For technology to happen a society requires permanent hierarchical organization (enslavement where the earliest examples) and strict divison of labor. Resources are merely a by-factor, which a society can workaround, when you dont have X to do Y, you make Z from A and do Y.

Its an interesting question, if you removed the artifacts, and kept the same organizations and relationships, my guess is that would mean almost no change. Instead of doing calculations with computers you would do computations with computers. (The first computers where human). If you removed the books and tax-software, still the tax people would walk around collecting their taxes and "inventing" bookkeeping. And we, fellow programmers, would still ponder of nice mind tricks and think of their solutions then apply them in society.
Can't edit anymore:
http://www.sourcingmap.com/usb-antitheft-security-alarm-for-...
Looks nice but clumsy. I was looking for something, the size of a USB thumb drive.
If you're hyper-smart, "The Goal" can be condensed to a few bullet points. The genius of "The Goal" is to highlight some not-immediatly-obvious problems and solutions in a readable and motivating fashion.

A lot of smart people (and even idiots like myself) have taken away quite a few good ideas from his writings - given how quick the books are to read, perhaps consider that you may be missing out.
Fun fact about sound: I discovered yesterday that one can restore sound on a Ubuntu 11.04 system by killing the pulseaudio process (it will instantly restart and restore sound.) No reboot required, in my case.

This is now one of the more frequent activities I do on my machine. Next step is to make a desktop shortcut or applet "Fix my Sound" or a command-line script, to avoid going through the incantation to find and kill the right proces. Then install Windows.

With the GUIs, problem is that Gnome and KDE and Canonical have gone through so many changes to their config systems (supposedly freedesktop.org D-Bus or something is supposed to fix that, but there is always at least one team starting up a vendetta against another team, and breaking compatibility), and even if there is new stuff that works, there are tons of packages in the Canonical repository that happily edit config that your environment isn't actually using (gtk vs gconf vs dconf vs kde vs gnome, etc)
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[The Mechanics Of Dirk Novitski's Jump Shot]
Interesting! ''.join() has the advantage on longer strings though:

$ python -mtimeit "'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' + 'bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb' + 'ccccccccccccccc' + 'ddddddddddddddd'"

1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.224 usec per loop

$ python -mtimeit "''.join(('aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa','bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb','ccccccccccccccc','ddddddddddddddd'))"

10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.201 usec per loop
You dont need sci-fi to ponder what happens when a superior technological culture meets a less technologicaly developed culture.

Look at Europes "discovery" of the americas, and for that matter, look at how the nomads of the world react when they are even today being "discovered" by us civilized people. You could study anthropolgy if you are into this sort of thing, its not really sci-fi, this is the real deal.
I really like that when I install the evince pdf viewer, it doesn't try to install the Yahoo search bar browser plugin like Adobe Acrobat. I even use evince on windows.
Making sure to eat sources of vitamin C to prevent scurvy, having women who intend to get pregnant eat more folate to help their babies' brains...(Not to mention not drinking alcohol while pregnant!)
Assembler to C
So how do you explain the lesser GDP growth?
- Better Bread? Historically bakers had extremely short lives because without mixers they had to breathe in the flour dust all day. And the bread would have been extremely unevenly cooked (no temperature-regulated ovens), as well as being extremely salty (no preservatives).

- Pasta? Pasta is absolutely amazing. It is an extremely dense source of calories, which doesn't rot, is super-compact, and only requires water and heat to cook. Great for armies on the march.

- Coffee? Coffee's been around a long time, but high-pressure espresso is relatively new.

Other fairly basic staples are newer than you might think, like Potatoes (16th Cent.), Or Tomatoes (17th Cent.)

Edit: Also limes for sailors.
I disagree. First, it's one slide.

Second. Users do care about features. Apple routinely, as in virtually every Jobs keynote, lists off features. They then demo them, but the slides list off actual capabilities.

Now you may say that Apple isn't a startup so they don't have to present things this way. Possibly, but well done features are still often the key differentiating factor between products.

I almost bought a new Nook -- know why I didn't? It lacked a key feature. The reason I don't use Pandora, but do use Grooveshark -- a key feature is missing in Pandora.

I know ppl love these grandiose -- "Everything you know is wrong" posts, but usually they spew poor advice.

With that said, the problem with these sorts of slides is more basic. They generally don't list the check boxes for all the features the competition has that you don't. I find these more useful when presented by a 3rd party. The nice thing about features is that a 3rd party can typically do a decent job of putting a list together, w/o input from any of the parties.
Make Me Want To Read Your Docs
From my own experience reading ebooks I find that when words are overly hyphenated that it takes away from legibility.
What kind of schedule are you expecting to keep?

And what are you planning for communication while working through?
Ask HN: What programming language was ______ written in?
I am curious as to what programming languages were used to make various products and thought it would be interesting to keep a running list of as many as we could.

Feel free to list as many as you can in the comments section and I'll try adding it to the master list. Or you can ask about one and hopefully someone will answer.

Facebook - PHP and C++
Mac OSX - C and Objective C
iOS - C and Objective C
Windows - C++, C, and C#
Linux - C
Android - C
Google - C++, Python, Java
Dropbox - Python
NSA - Python
Yelp - Python
Quora - Python
Youtube - Python
Slide - Python
NASA - Python
...
This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.

Which explains why most enterprises, once they settle on a distro, will stretch that version of the distro out for years -- all their technical staff will learn it, their greybeards will know how to wrangle weirdness out of it, they'll build an internal knowledge base how to resolve the particular 10 issues they have with it...etc. Once it's configured according to the 100 step config guide it'll run like an appliance and nobody will think anything about it unless some hardware fails.

For the end user, the endless twiddling just to get something running on their system kills any dubious efficiency improvements once it's up and running. No wonder folks are simply grabbing the useful tools and replacing the broken desktop OS with OS X.
I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but they've made some great promo videos for some YC companies.

http://grumomedia.com/get-a-video/
Exactly. "Deregulation" without the ability of actors within the system to set their own prices is pretty much a recipe for disaster. In a normal market you make more money by selling more product. In California the energy producers discovered that given their regulatory environment they could make more money by selling less product. The rest is history.

California's problems do show, however, that people shouldn't uncritically think that any sort of deregulation is good. Its always important to to think carefully about what sorts of incentive are being created in any deregulation.
Samsung Chromebook Series 5
Agreed, but the style of post appears to be characteristic of many on the site -- slightly longer than a tweet.
No the title is "Revolution in the valley", subtitled "the insanely great story of how the Mac was made":
http://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Story...
It's non-obvious that asserts would just be #define'd out of existence when NDEBUG is defined if you haven't been told that specifically.
sorta - I get the feeling the license occurred during the whole iPhone trademark problem with Cisco.
NSA Python

Yelp Python

Quora Python

Youtube Python

Slide Python

NASA Python
It's the start of a very, very informal argument that the optimum number of randomly assigned objects for any N containers to maximize the number of individually packed containers is N. This problem asks you for what happens if N = 365.
Always worth checking. Although the relative merits change when doing many joins to build up a single long string.

This recommendation is to go with .join() by default:

In performance sensitive parts of the library, the ''.join() form should be used instead. This will ensure that concatenation occurs in linear time across various implementations. — http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

despite the fact it might not be better in CPython.
Python: lambda functions
I guess CSS text shadows aren't always horrible
You are being overly simplistic, but its a valid point.
And quite frankly a few of us have reversed the VC/Angel criteria for picking startups and use that as an interview/offer acceptance filter...

I know out of the last 3 months only one startup out of 20 made to the almost offer stage, I am awaiting them signing a big client that funds my position..

It came down to:
1 People involved.
2 Product/Company/market vision
3 User/client growth
4 Mixture of honesty and transparency..told me where they could be honest and transparent and where they could not disclose and the reasons why.
I'm not saying TDD is good or bad per se. I'm merely saying it's not a good approach for exploring a problem domain.

(Tho' I do think Ron Jeffries is a snake-oil peddler).
You're not necessarily wrong, but try being less nasty about it.
That is a really long and verbose questionnaire.
Exit interviews when I left some jobs weren't even that long.

With the attention spans the way they are, I would be surprised if their completion rate is anything more than single digit percentages.
The original scheme recognized a particular sequence of code; recognizing particular behavior no matter how it's implemented is in theory equivalent to the halting problem, I think.
I have a THEORY that it is easier to get an internship at a Startup than at a large company (during your first 2 years of college). If you are willing to work for a little less (maybe free-- get equity, choose wisely), then you could snag an internship right after your freshman year, when normally your options would be slim (larger companies tend to have these rules that bar interns until their Junior year). Here's the good: while most are working at McDonald's during their first college summer, or sitting around, you will be gaining solid experience.

If you can't get a good enough internship, then remember to start your own company! This is especially true if you won't necessarily need to make money during the summer months. You can probably pilot and test your idea during the school year, and you can play a different story when its time to get your first full-time job. The experience of having your own thing on the side while in college will set you down a different path once you graduate. Also, it will help you select and see the benefit of taking a few business-related electives! This is important! You will learn that it is important to be able to manage finances (take a finance course!) as well as market your brand/idea/self (take a marketing/sales/branding course).

Starting your own thing on the side is likely to provide you with a context for the best possible real world experience you can hope for. After working on your own thing, and seeing what its really like out there, then you will have questions, and you will assess everything with a keen observational eye (when you go for your next internship). You may also be better equipped (awareness) to negotiate when its time to secure your first full-time job. You will also not need to ask yourself, "startup vs. large company vs. entrepreneur," as you will have tested the waters young.

The main benefit of interning at a large company is to see what its like at a large company.
First Pass at Palin Emails by Opani
> [Despite the existence of "enumerate", "xrange(maxint)"] can still
> be useful when you want to include an index along with several
> other lists, however, e.g. zip(list_1, list_2, indices)

I would just use

for idx, (elt1, elt2) in enumerate(zip(list_1, list_2))

The following is not necessarily good advice, and he should take his own earlier advice and validate his claims with some profiling.

> [map is ] much faster, since the loop takes place entirely in
> the C API and never has to bind loop variables to Python
> objects.

> If you find yourself making the same list comprehension
> repeatedly, make utility functions and use map and/or filter...

Note that the following "map" snippet is considerably slower than the corresponding list-comprehension snippet. Function calls are expensive in python. Also, his claim that you save time with a "map" by avoiding the loop variable is obviously bogus: you still have to bind the variables in the signature of the function you're mapping, unless the signature is empty.

met% python -m timeit "[x**3 for x in xrange(10000)]"
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.27 msec per loop
met% python -m timeit "map(lambda x: x**3, xrange(10000))"
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.88 msec per loop
Make one and post the link :P
This reminds me of the "Metalworking Shop From Scrap" book series: http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/
IMF hit by major cyber attack
You did write that blog post? Nice job, man! I skimmed over the rest of the blog and it's got some pretty nice articles on. I especially like the one concerning VIM and Python[1].

1. http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/05/24/vim-as-python-ide/
Here's a list of what seem to me, in hindsight, to be the biggest mistakes in the design of C++:

1) Header files. They don't improve your code or your build process in any way, they just make you retype everything twice and make the compiler reprocess everything as many times as it's included. There's no reason why even a low-level language today can't have a module system like Java's, where everything is typed in and compiled only once.

2) Having exceptions without having garbage collection. Having both of these, or none of these, would have been OK, but having one and not the other makes writing exception-safe code unnecessarily difficult. It took people years to write the first correct exception-safe container class and understand all the tricky leaks that can happen. See Tom Cargill's 1994 article: http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/imprint_downloads/informit/aw... and Herb Sutter's failed answer in 1997: http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/008.htm .

3) The template mechanism is too general and not a good fit for many of the tasks that people are trying to solve with it. Easy tasks like parameterized container types would've been better solved with a simpler mechanism like Ada generics (no specialization, no implicit instantiation, only one copy of object code, possible to compile separately). Harder tasks should be solved with purpose-built mechanisms, e.g. if you really need lambda, build it into the language. Faking lambda with templates isn't much better than faking it with preprocessor macros.

4) Strings should've been built in, and done right. There must be only one string type (Unicode). All string literals must be instances of that type. No null-terminated strings anywhere, they're a very bad default. If your application demands shaving a couple cycles from operations on character buffers, you can always use custom code.

I'm not asking for garbage collection, multithreading, GUI toolkits or any other fancy features. C++ could've gotten these five things right and still be a very good fit for all the bare metal speed hackery that people want.
> I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux.

When switching from windows Me to Vista, my stepmother had to change her scanner and printer that were perfectly working because there aren't any driver. They both still work with the latest Linux (and Mac OS X).

This is quite typical of the problems under windows : forced upgrades, nagwares, malwares...
How do plan for the bot to reply in? Traditional chinese characters or han yu pin yin?
Any modern x86 processor can do that too. The thing is, the complexity of the circuitry involved increases faster than linearly so being able to break it out into two sets of load/store queues would let you increase bandwidth by a fair bit.
Can you provide links for NSA and NASA, please?

[Edit]: Thx for the links, guys!
Research is only possible because of the economic surpluses made possible because of, among other things, liquid capital markets. Who do you think pays for CERN, the LHC, et al? Ordinary taxpayers doing those jobs you think are "disappointing". Maybe if scientists disparage them enough, they'll stop paying...
I'm interested. This can be a group (more than 2 people) activity, right? I'm thinking of a Khan academy approach, not necessarily videos, but exchange of resources and insights as we go into the book.
You forgot one thing ...
leave the old documentation where people can easily find it, CakePHP does this well http://book.cakephp.org/ Rails? no so well http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
It's only profit if your time spent on it was worthless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
I can't speak for the rest of the points, but the point about Experts and Experience is too general to the point of being useless. Ok, don't blindly follow the advice of so-called "experts"? I shouldn't blindly follow the advice in this article?
The Delphi IDE is written in Delphi, but the Delphi compiler is written in C.
'NSA uses Python for cryptography and intelligence analysis.'

http://waprogramming.com/papers/vol1-no1/(73-76)%20Python%20...

...and...

http://www.python.org/about/success/usa/
They are different books, but both are great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQS8EDG1P4&feature=playe... (timestamped)

There's also a list of other companies using Python I didn't mention in my earlier comment. That was a session speech given by Wesley Chun, author and long time programmer for Python and current Google employee along with the founder of Python, Guido van Rossom, at this year's 2011 Google IO conference.
I agree with you (and the author of the article). However FB is not the only endeavor of this sort. I get exactly the same kind of feeling whenever I see a TV (in stores or friends' houses): obviously talented individuals (actors, script writers etc) devoting their energy to producing entertainment for morons. Such is the power of money ...
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The 1632 book series is about an American town transplanted back into Europe in 1632. Since it's a whole town they bring more than just knowledge, but it's still fairly interesting to read. In my opinion the first or maybe first two books are enjoyable, after that it turns into too many layers of "what if".

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series
Windows is C, not C++
Fueling a Stock Bubble with Facebook Fans
Should be both
Pasta is an amazing invention. It's functionally similar to hard tack except it can be prepared to an edible state very quickly with merely boiling water and also tastes much better.
Cheap Threads
U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors Abroad
Hashtags - Twitter's Secret Handshake - Cultural Studies
I commented on the post but will post it here as well;

I had a similar thing with @apress a few years ago, I set up an automated twitter feed to post the daily book deal to a twitter account, a couple of months afterwards I checked and realized @apress was just given to Apress without any email or notice (everything I posted too was lost)

Fair play to apress I contacted them and they got back to me within half an hour, they had no idea twitter hadn’t contacted me they were just given the account and they apologised to me..

I very much doubt its the TB more likely to be the TB search, marketing or social media agency who want to control the brand rather than embrace and engage (ironic eh) infact I’d doubt that TB is fully aware of what has happened (until they get into the office on monday morning and see the hundreds of @ replies they've had)
Suggestion: As long as you're not putting anything useful on your landing page, why not join the This Page Intentionally Left Blank Project?

http://www.this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org/
I think the idea behind the slide is to answer the question "Why would someone use your service instead of another?" I think there are several approaches you can take to answer such a question.

Maybe a solid approach is:

Take the list of features your competitors have.
Subtract the features people don't want
Add the features that people are looking for that no one has.

If you implement more features, you don't necessarily have to implement them poorly. Maybe you need a larger team or more time.
Great tips, I learned Python a while ago and have been focused on Ruby recently. I wonder what the equivalent of this post would be for becoming a proficient Ruby programmer... any advice, guys?

Here are two good Stack Overflow threads:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1092675/what-ruby-knowled...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2569501/what-ruby-and-rai...
If you're a CEO and you discover your engineers are running projects under the radar, then it's time to take your axe to the org chart and get swinging on those middle managers.
Realização de um sonho
Lethal Chemistry at Harvard (1998)
Venus Williams excited to be back
Here are some of the quotes from Venus Williams’s press conference at Eastbourne, where she will play against Andrea Petkovic in the first round in her first Tour match since retiring against …
For people who know his work, I see that only The Goal is available for Kindle. Are the others under different titles for America?