skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not quite this bad, but here's one of the things that happens to me:

Very early during the programming process, I'll create a debugging console -- an arbitrary, ugly GUI that lets me control the values in the data structure. For testing.

Weeks later, when I want to design an intuitive interface, that debugging console seems very intuitive to me. It's hard to ask, "Where would a user who wants to do X look?" since I've done it hundreds of times and know where to look.
Why are you wondering whether you have an idea or 'something more'? Just build it, or hire somebody to build it for you, or talk it over with some people. Anything that moves you forward. Wondering what you have isn't going to help you at all.
For those who aren't interested in seeing a picture of a scrotum being operated on, the technique described is a polymer that is injected into the vas deferens. As sperm pass the polymer, their membranes and tails are damaged. The technique can be reversed using a solvent.
Interesting:

"We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important."
This is precisely the example repeatedly cited by the author of the post and the author he quoted: people doing very basic addition using a calculator.

If you focus your vision on these sorts of example, the rise of calculators is reasonably disastrous-looking! My comment meant to destroy the artificial dichotomy that calculators are "good" or "bad". They are clearly capable of generating some appalling lazy mathematical habits, but they're also clearly able to extend your abilities, improve pedagogy, and garner insights impossible to consider unaided.

Science and mathematics have wholeheartedly embraced computers as a tool for analysis and exploration. Education cannot ignore that. Simultaneously, many abstract concepts that people must know to make use of computers are best learned by replicating the exact work the computer can save you later.

The benefits of trading off toward laborious computation are going to be especially pronounced while learning things, of course.
My num was 60 in her list of boyfriends
We're are you based at? We are in process of improving the maps for Northern America but there should be Gateways here and there and at least in cities.
John Lasseter: Father of the Year
Most irritating comment I've read on HN in a long time. This type of comment is simultaneously the best and worst thing about geeks.
> What system would you have instead of capitalism? If socialism or the like, can you give an example of when that has ever worked well?

At the risk of getting into a political debate, Spain in the 1930's?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spanish_Revol...
Free Electricity Devices
This site is a cool site I bumped into while looking up free electricity devices. I like what i see I am going to build a free electricity generator. good video.
Mobile phones: "connected" business people tethered to their devices
>Guitar hero has a mode that lets you practice pieces of a song. You can practice each segment to perfection, then play the whole song. This targeted practice should be a lot more effective and still obey the idea of what he's saying.

I guess maybe we understood him differently, because I thought that was the point he was getting at.

Regardless, I agree with the idea of "targeted practice" of each section. It's been awhile since I've done any serious piano playing, but my strategy for perfecting a piece was always to nail the final 4-8 bars 5x in a row. Then I would keep adding another 4-8 bars to the beginning of that and repeat the process until I could play the whole thing through.

I found working from the end to be much more effective than from the start. My guess is that it's less tedious since the new part is at the beginning, so if you're restarting after each mistake, you end up focusing on the new material instead of racing through the old boring material to get to the new stuff.
"Compared to other illegal activities they might have engaged in such as selling drugs..."

The author didn't really assume they would be dealing drugs, he just wanted to show the advantages of their current scheme over another common illegal alternative.
Why Envy Motivates Us — PsyBlog
The idea of "real value" is bizarre.

The value of something is how much you can get in return for the thing from a purchaser that you can find. Even "value is what we agree it is" isn't really right, it's what you can concretely get for the thing. (For instance, the fact that a certain Magic the Gathering card is listed in some book for $20 is meaningless if you can't find anyone who will give you more than $5.) There is no other definition of value that's actually useful, but there are plenty of others out there that will lead you astray.
That's amazing, I wish any of my math books had that; we would probably see a lot more young programmers these days. I can seriously say that the only reason I even got into programming was discovering TI-Basic in 7th grade (although the habits it taught me had to be slowly unlearned as I started using a real language ;)
I can definitely relate to that. I was in a discussion a while ago with 2 friends, and I was "the Java guy". After that chat, I decided to go back to C# and give it a second chance, despite my Microsoft allergy ;)

It is clearly a better designed language, which of course "borrowed" a lot (90%?) from Java - and then improved it.
Smart money is they'll have all three (OTA syncing, better notification system, and better lock screen) in iOS5.
The crux of the issue as I see it is an extension of what mathematics educators call "number sense." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sense)

It seems from many of the other comments is that people recognize that performing exact mental-arithmetic calculations is rarely necessary; however, the more intuitive understanding of how numbers relate in magnitude etc. is critically important. Estimation is something that I think many of us take for granted, but that has some significant mental pre-requisites.

Interestingly, a growing branch of mathematics education has been working to explore whether the traditional rote memorization is the most effective way of instilling this more hollistic understanding of numbers. If people were interested, I could ask some educator friends for more up-to-date links/citations on this topic.
Satellites map ground water via gravitational fluxuations
Is there excitement? All I see is a press release on a website.
In Scala the _ is the anaphoric it, not necessarily a lambda form (although Scala does the lambda inference based on it). That is, _ serves the same general role as Clojure's % in these examples.
I so want a 15" laptop with this.
Excellent post, but I wouldn't have distilled quite the same catch phrase -- "You don't get shit you don't ask for" -- from that anecdote. It's more like, "When someone offers you help, take them up on it."
The .ba extension doesn't seem to be well supported by various who is engines, but the IP address that responds when pinged is 69.73.174.253, and is apprently owned by Landis Holdings, not Microsoft. It seems someone registered the MS name with a relatively obscure extension.
Fantastic! I am glad to see support for HTTP 1.1. Anyone know if unicorn/Rails 3.1 chunked responses will work out of the box?
Testing EventKit and UIPasteboard Without the Simulator
I'm sure you know this, but Glasgow is in Scotland, not England.

(I was worried others would be confused by your comment).
QIK: How a mobile video company sold to SKYPE for $150 million – w Bhaskar Roy
also github is not a YC startup
I agree that transferring the passes is not particularly amoral nor should it be illegal, but selling a pass to falsely contest a parking ticket is. That is what the author (mis)labeled entrepreneurial.
You meant BOLD? No wonder the author has that part in bold :p

seriously tho i like the article - the www must remain free and google's interference is already overwhelming. i'm not saying it's negative interference, it's just too much interference if you know what i mean. ads, etc, guidelines, rules dictated and what not. where is the good ol free www?
The way I work: David Karp of Tumblr
Bonus points for reading the whole article without flinching!
So that means that once you have the procedure done on you, you don't have to do anything (no regular medicine) until you want it reversed?
Joi Ito Interview (Tokyo Hackerspace meets MIT Media Lab)
seeing any kind of operation done in that region I come to think a condom is actually a pretty good idea
This is going to change the world ... this is by far going to have deepest sociological impact (good & bad) on the society ... because many men will use this secretly without telling their partner to avoid having kids ... which eventually will bring enormous decrease in population ...

Now someone should come out with novel technique to avoid STD without using condoms ... combination of these 2 techniques will be VIOLA !!!!! :)
Currently iOS devices are peripherals that need to be plugged into iTunes on a Mac for syncing purposes.

iCloud might be a step away from that.

We don't know yet what the cloud service is, but Apple has been building out some impressive amounts of data center resources, so it's likely to be an interesting service, whatever it is.
Corrections: Linux isn't simple and I do actually want Apple hardware.
A 100% effective, low maintenance, reversible birth control method could have an incredible effect on the future of the species. I'm guessing the benefits of fewer unwanted children will be incredible. The possible downsides include a dangerously low birth rate and forced temporary sterilization, but I think the long term effects will be very positive.
I have an idea for a reuse of the hackernews code. Is it reasonable for me to start by trying to edit it into a working site?
A denotational interpreter for a λ-calculus-based language
I'm a fan of FP and I find most of the arguments being made here for FP over OO to be quite unconvincing. You don't need to understand mathematics anymore in FP than you need to in OO. If there is any mathematics in FP it's of the logical variety anyhow - which programmers are already familiar with.
If anything, they should sue themselves for leaking the news.
Processing.js v1.2 Released
Wow. The entire premise of the article aside, for me the idea that medical treatments can be made with physics and not medicine was an incredible, incredible revelation.

This man (not a doctor!) has invented a method to neutralize sperm in a way that would never have occurred to me. He uses the most basic principles of physics (magnetic charge) to neutralize sperm!

Realizing that sperm is negatively charging, he simply coats a short section of the inside of the vas (tiny tube going from testes to the penis, located in the scrotum) with a positively-charged polymer. As sperm travels in this coated tube, the ionic attraction causes damage on a cellular level in the sperm, the pull effect effectively destroying the sperm "tail" and preventing it from fertilizing a female but without hormonal/medical methods!

For me, as an engineer, this was a true revelation.
The Value of a 70-Year-Old Software Engineer
I'm in England, and I see them all the time. Lincoln was the first city I saw them pop up in (several years ago) but anecdotally I'd say about a quarter of the machines I come across require you to input your number plate.
Courteous.ly lets others know how backed up your inbox is
I'd like to hear more about what is being done on the packaging front, specifically Rubygems v Debian.

Last I heard, the Debian folks weren't too happy with RubyGems because people who install RubyGems can upgrade gem dependencies without updating dpkg resulting in an inconsistent state. IIRC there was effort underway to bring RubyGems and all of it's gems into the dpkg repository.
Indeed, not usually applicable to urban living. But the main points come through, namely, find a place to work where you can get away from life distractions and gear it so that it is conceptually/aesthetically separated from the rest of your life; then have some ritual which signifies when it's work time. Mark Boulton in (_Designing for the Web_) has a separate, work-only room in his house, and his ritual is to keep his shoes on during the day (work time) and take them off when he's done (home time).
We'd see the return of the sexual revolution.
I don't get the part about "forced temporary sterilization."

If people want to force you to be sterile, wouldn't they use a different method?
You are correct. Except for that part of the population that believes contraception is immoral. Or that rather large part of the population that can't afford the procedure or choose to remain ignorant of even basic contraception.

Something like this is certainly more convenient, but ultimately the best method is education.
I'd suggest this is strongly regional (and observe that Glasgow is in Scotland, not England, but anyway...) - I have had to input part of my number plate when buying a physical ticket (as opposed to online/phone ticketless billing) but it's been a rare occurrence.
What is design? It isn't that.
Since I don't have any training in Category Theory, I don't know what I don't know. I do know that it seems from the outside of the Ivory Tower that the explanations for FP are far more difficult to understand than the FP itself.

But then again, perhaps if I had studies mathematics, I might have some additional insights into FP that go beyond knowing all of the jargon.
I hate it as well but it's easy to see you're right as customers themselves go ahead and add the missing "i" in front of products. How many times have you heard people say "iTouch" instead of "iPod Touch" and "iTV" instead of "Apple TV"?
Using RVM to Install Rails 3.1: Best Practices
Actually I tend to have strips of tape attached to my desk, with the sticky-parts up. The ends are turned over and stuck to the desk.

I stick the screw heads to the tape. They stay pretty well, are easy to get-to, and it's easy to arrange them as you want. I usually put them in a compacted form of the layout they were on the board.
Or Google Docs, Google Calendar, Evernote...
Gentzen Calculi
These design articles are interesting but I wish more would provide examples of what you should do instead of just what you shouldn't.
How to be interviewed
Ask HN: Which Twitter accounts to follow hacker news
@HNTweets firehose of all news stories that make the front page
@hackernewsbot - the 'hottest' (top ranked?)
@HackerNews seems defunct

Better ideas?
More People, Please
Wow, it gets even more interesting:

/tmp $ cd redis-2.2.8/
/tmp/redis-2.2.8 $ make
/tmp/redis-2.2.8 $ cd src
/tmp/redis-2.2.8/src $ ./redis-server
[295] 31 May 15:36:30 # Warning: no config file specified, using the default config. In order to specify a config file use 'redis-server /path/to/redis.conf'
[295] 31 May 15:36:30 * Server started, Redis version 2.2.8
[295] 31 May 15:36:30 # WARNING overcommit_memory is set to 0! Background save may fail under low memory condition. To fix this issue add 'vm.overcommit_memory = 1' to /etc/sysctl.conf and then reboot or run the command 'sysctl vm.overcommit_memory=1' for this to take effect.
[295] 31 May 15:36:30 * The server is now ready to accept connections on port 6379
[295] 31 May 15:36:30 - 0 clients connected (0 slaves), 790480 bytes in use
[295] 31 May 15:36:35 - 0 clients connected (0 slaves), 790480 bytes in use
[295] 31 May 15:36:40 - 0 clients connected (0 slaves), 790480 bytes in use
It was confirmed recently that apple bought 12 petabytes of isilon storage.

Assuming the offering of ~3GB per cloud user, that is enough for up to 4 million accounts.

Given that their DC is 400,000 SF -- and the aerial view suggests at least two zones, it is pretty clear what and how they are offering this.

What would be interesting is if this offering is just integrated into iTunes and the new OS -- as would make sense.

If you have an iTunes account, you jsut have 3gb storage that now comes with it.

Accessible from any apple device you own - like your iPad and iPhone - your content is seamlessly accessible across three platforms + the web.

Obvious play.
Indeed... Simple, and probably wrong.

I won't pretend that Perl's unicode support sucks; Working with Unicode in Perl is far more complicated than it ought to be and rife with bugs and corner-cases. However, working with Unicode properly in just about any language requires a whole lot of careful thought and consideration.

Maybe Java (and by extension JVM languages) is the best you can get right now, I dunno...
SMLserver home page
How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day
Scarcity of money is not the most desirable end, because the supply and demand for money threatens to change the value of money. Even if all the money in the world were fixed, you would see inflation and deflation, more inflation than you've ever seen on a properly managed fiat money system. This is not mere economic theory, it's a matter of history.
What’s New in SEO for May 31, 2011
Ten Innovative Ways to Use Twitter for Business
Certainly, it appears that the insert and delete key icons are based on classic proofreader's marks.

The caret above the "a" means insert.
The a with the looped line through it means delete.
It'd be nice to be able to merge the comments of dups. At least we could all be on the same page.
I wonder how Jacques avoids the Internet distractions in his new setup as he still has a network connection.

I am also the kind of person who gets distracted rather easily as I have a really broad spectrum of hobbies/interests. I've tried some similar approaches without much success.

Back in old days when I was still a graduate student, I had a paper deadline due in a few days, but I was addictive in Slashdot discussion then. I experimented fully command line work environment: no browsers, no X-windows, only a few linux consoles you can switch among by pressing Alt-Fx. The transition was painful, as I had to look for command line equivalent to view pdf/ps/eps files, gdb is not as convenient as ddd, etc. However, my productivity gain was enormous, at least for the first a few days. The curve quickly flattened and began to fall, as I started to use command line browsers such as lynx/links and I discovered a few legacy games.

Another time I went even further: screw the Internet! I installed Slackware onto an old dell notebook and uninstalled all fun games and apps, unplug the wireless card and went to the public library nearby for a day. Almost the same result, I had done lots of task at an amazing speed initially. Then, I got bored, and wrote a frame-buffer based Galaga-like shooting game and played/improved it for the rest of the day.
Cheat in Old Snakey game on Gmail
In Gmail, under Mail Settings | Labs there are "Old Snakey" javascript game.
There are only few people who knows that there are cheat i this game allowing us to unlock all 14 hidden levels, etc.
Can you find this cheat??? Presto! :)
Grubwithus (YC W11) hits Boston, aims for 30 cities this year
my chrome browser froze upon "inspect element" - perhaps that is intentional of the author to prevent me from seeing how he made those cute clouds move.

However, M1573RMU74710N makes a good point - engineers are tested on their code.

M1573RMU74710N just gave Loren the answers to the interview questions "how would you optimize this site?"
If you just lost your appetite for the entire day when you saw the single shot on that video, you are not alone.
If what you're suggesting is that coins can only sit in one address for a limited amount of time, then that would not do anything because people would just create new addresses to send the coins to.
This is sad indeed, however as someone who downloads my media instead of subscribing to advertising-infested cable, I don't think this is going to impact me much more than reducing the length of the show by a couple of minutes.

You certainly don't see BBC Horizon going this route, I wonder why that could be. </sarcasm>
Optimisation is not the same as programming. You can program in Assembly without trying to make your code as performant as possible. Just because you use Assembly as your medium of describing your intent, doesn't mean that you're obsessive about micro-optimisation.
Company politics in startups vs big companies
Americano - MVP for CoffeeScript
Good article, but it's "root" and "rooting" not "rout" and "routing." Somewhat hilarious reversal of meaning via that typo.
The 70ish programmer I work with is fabulously valuable and he's not even directly leveraging his hard-to-find COBOL skills (he works as a SQL DBA, we have other COBOL programmers on staff).

His main value to me is that he can immediately and measurably improve any design we bring to him.

When I'm designing a new system or process I always run it by him and he'll give me a few thoughtful suggestions that make my design more robust, auditable, and maintainable. This "unconscious competence" [1] borne of decades in the trenches can't be taught.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
Someone should make the Git equivalent of Wordpress: deploy this thing on your server and have your own private Github-like engine.

I think Github is a lot like Rails: they took this cool thing (Ruby / Git) and made it attract a bunch of douches.
New Red Programming Language Gets Syllable Backend
From influentials to small connected groups
Concealed carry in the US is an awesome thing.
Yep. But it is those kind of people that end up making a difference in this world (for better or worse).
Ah, I misunderstood. So you're talking about something like <canvas> animations or even <video> ads?

I could see how that could be a big deal for iPad users. But it doesn't seem like it changes the fundamentals of web advertising.
It has not led to more crime in America. Elsewhere in the world, countries have been invaded(not only by America), laws broken, tens of thousands of lives taken. So if WSJ's idea of the world is just America, their article is perfectly fine. But. Abroad, things are chaotic due to the economic downturn, wealth including oil and natural resources is being taken from poor countries literally under gun point. Darfur, all over Africa, the middle east, etc, crime is in their maximum ever.
Fox News Ticker Hacked
I think the problem is the aspect of intimidation. If these guys were to offer to buy the ticket off you in a fair way, they may have a point.

I can assure you that this is not what happens ;-)
D somewhat lacks stability. The language is still maturing and there was, for a long time, a major split in which standard library was... standard (and even now, that question isn't really clear). There's also the issue of tools - there are only two D compilers I know of, and neither of them is that great (and GDC is buggy, IME). It's also got several warts of its own.

When D matures a little more, maybe. At least C++ has a stable standard lib.

That's why I'm holding off on using it, and (with the exception of the standard lib) probably why most people are holding back.
Standard ML. It's simple, well-designed, stable, and consistent.

http://www.itu.dk/~tofte/publ/tips.pdf

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/stg/NOTES/notes.pdf

A full book. It's good, but don't start with it: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/smlbook/
For places with runaway population growth that might be interested, a temporary, effective, and low-maintenance method might be more politically palatable than the alternatives.
I disagree.
Speaking of PBS Nova specifically, the shows are 56 minutes (give or take 3min) long once commercials are removed.
I know this because I download my media and the commercials are removed for me so all I do to see how long a show is, is look at the remaining-time in VLC.
Do Social News Sites Deteriorate? (Analysis of 1.8M HN Comments)