skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone working professionally on a large ASP.NET site and at home on a Rails (MVC pattern) site, I would strongly encourage you to use ASP.NET MVC 3. MVC has much clearer separation of concerns and is much easier to test.

Also, there is a fair amount of community/open source add-ons around ASP.NET MVC.
> When was the last time you tried KDE4?

About a month or so ago.

> I found that it was very unstable and buggy when I first tried it when it came out.

My problem with it isn't bugginess, it's that they'd removed the existing UI and replaced it with new stuff that worked differently. This means that I no longer know where to find stuff (e.g. for configuration).

Also some of the new interface I really don't like, e.g. they have replace the main menu with a scrolling menu that only shows a few options at a time, so I have to scroll up and down to see all the options. This "feature" on its own is one I dislike so much that I will not willingly use this interface.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Most people don't realize they are implementing a lisp interpreter in their massive rewrite, yet after the fact, to anybody who is familiar, it shows up right away.
Coming soon !
It is worth noting that support for CSS 3D Transforms was committed to Firefox this week. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505115 for all the gory details.
If you are talking about video, I don't play video on the computer.
What can startups from Europe do to get more media coverage in USA?
Hi everyone,

I'm feeling downhearted after seeing (several times) that it is very difficult for European companies (with a budget not so great) to obtain coverage of U.S. media (blogs, newspapers, magazines ...)

Of course it is much easier when you are there or if you have a great budget to spend on ads and PR, but... how can be possible that a product that people love in other countries doesn't attract attention of the media on USA?

After releasing the new version of our product, Tourist Eye (http://www.touristeye.com), we have made the impossible to contact with sites like Mashable, Techcrunch or The Next Web, but we only arouse interest of European media (Techcrunch Europe has written about us twice).

People from here has written incredible post about the new version of Tourist Eye. What could we do to awake the interest of the american media? does that means our product is not so good as we thought? (well... I think this always happen hehe, but check yourself).

Thanks for your comments and sorry for the sad tone of my post. I'm usually a very happy person... but I need some answers today to sleep peacefully.
Agreed. Once I converted all the exercises to coffeescript (syntactically similar to python) they made more sense.
Confessions of a Prof Who Believes Higher Ed Isn't the Only Goal
Of course it does !
There's also an interesting tool that's open source in case you don't want to pay for Interview Street called WebCat used by some universities to run automated test cases. Not all software can be automatically tested (and in the case of WebCat, I think there are only plugins for C++ and Java at the moment).

http://web-cat.cs.vt.edu/
Directions from the US to UK used to say "swim across the atlantic ocean"
please leave your email! we could chat,
Thanks
There's also MP4 for the four individual sections of the talk (see phone icon).
Just because Apple did it doesn't mean it's good. Whoever made that UI design decision did not understand the way human silhouette recognition works.

iOS icons are terrible. All the time on my iPhone I just find myself staring at the screen not knowing where anything is. This never happens to me on the PC.

It is just a bad style decision and I wish they would change it.
WhiteHat Security hacks ChromeOS, exposes extension vulnerability at Black Hat
Are we not being bankrupted by run-away corporate greed? Probably not, but more importantly, will the average American think we are? That has a much greater chance to be yes.

If some sort of revolutionary spirit starts in the US, corporations will be targeted just as much as the government. Big if, but we are much closer than we were 20 years ago.
yet another article about UI where the author presents a hypothesis as though it were the conclusion of research. does nobody actually do usability testing before writing?
What does reducing wealth inequality have to do with stimulating the economy? (I haven't heard that argument before.)
"... find yourself in a position where the only way to protect yourself is not to assert your own IP, but to have to resort to buying IP you didn't create."

True to a point. But isn't it telling that Apple had to resort to buying IP it didn't create? What does that tell you?
" 'The magnetic storm that is soon to develop probably will be in the moderate to strong level,' said Joseph Kunches...'This will be a two or three out of five on the NOAA Space Weather Scale'"

I would call that weak to moderate by their own scale. It would be disappointing for a boy who cried wolf attitude to develop between official warnings and the public. I guess the 1859 storm is the 5 end of the spectrum.

The volcano experts have handled this aspect of their job quite well, even if many cities and towns have rejected evacuation recommendations.
I only use e-mail via Gmail, so Fetchmail snarfs everything, even my replies. And another option would be Getmail.
Because people contribute whenever they're interested in it, this is great in many different ways. However, using an open source project as an excuse to not do the work yourself (regardless of the reasons or the problems) is just silly.
I thought Wufoo was a largely PHP stack?
I think you have a good point about filling potholes being cheaper than repairing cars, but that wasn't really the point I was making. (I'm not necessarily against filling potholes, just filling potholes excessively as make-work.) I was just pointing out that saying that government spending to hire pothole fillers for the express purpose of stimulating the economy is falling for the broken window fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
Before i can lend an opnion i would like to know what is the aim of this site.Are you creating another facebook or what? And why would people want to use your site ,whats in it for them?
Fox News and Christian bashing, it reads like Slashdot on here.
As a consumer I don't mind free stuff. Engaging legislation so you can keep charging for something that is free sounds wrong to me (from a consumer perspective).

I mean no one complains about WalMart right ? It is convenient and people have to muster some other kinds of emotion to be against it (patriotism, low wages and exploitation etc).
IOS beta 5 released
Ah, I didn't see that. Well, that's much less of a hassle than Real— thanks!
In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time (1976), a human mind is uploaded to a computer, and finds himself running an interstellar spacecraft. Since he has to be awake for centuries, he comes up with a trick. He writes a virus to erase all of his memories of boredom, so the next time he becomes bored and realizes he's experiencing a heretofore "new" emotion, he feels novelty. Then somehow, he learns of the trick and does it to himself again.

I guess that once we're uploaded, we could use something like this to "solve" the reddit and HN repost issue.
I opened this and discovered a lot of names and phone numbers I didn't recognize.

As it turns out, these contacts were all from my dad. I used his blackberry once last year to check my Facebook and I guess it loaded his contacts into my Facebook account. I don't remember authorizing it to do that (though it was likely in something I just clicked through). Still, this seems like an easy way to steal contact lists from people - "oh hey, can I check my Facebook real quick?"

Like I said, this was a year ago, so I'm sure things have changed (another commenter mentions "a hubbub about this a while ago"), but neither I nor my dad realized what had happened until now (he still doesn't know, I suspect).
11 places you would not expect to run Linux
Agreed. But more, is there any evidence that these types of technical tests actually select for better employees?
At a Hacker Conference, Plenty of Friendly Feds
Well, I seem to use color to pick out icons on OS X. If the icons were black and white, then I think the OP has a valid point.
I'm interested in distributing subtitles online but am also at a loss to know where to start.

I think the problem is that there are so many different owners and licensers of content that there's no one way to get rights for content.

The problem only gets multiplied by the number of different countries, each having their own laws.
That reminds me - I really must go back to my analysis of the coding challenge I set ages ago. I got most of the way through, but never finished.

I ought to complete it.

In case you're interested, it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383169

I'm not accepting more submissions.
I like the idea of removing power from the federal government in favor of states, but in the case of a service like social security, mobility between states could cause massive issues. State x would not have a safety net, prompting companies and workers to operate there for the tax break. State y, providing a safety net, would be swamped with retirees but not productive workers. Citizens would be hugely incented to game the system. I don't see how it could be sustainable.
Find someone that may not be quite that good, but is ambitious and still learning, then help him grow into what you need.
Or perhaps something like this - i.e. an attempt to erode the credibility of S&P:

http://www.treasury.gov/connect/blog/Pages/Just-the-Facts-SP...
Are we becoming too analytical?
The Democrats controlled the Senate, the House and the White House until a lot were booted out of the House. They still control the Senate and the White House and yet the S&P downgrade in your mind is due to the Republicans?
We have not won the war on boredom. At best we have won the war on idleness, which is only a lite version of it. If anything, these kill-time gadgets exacerbate the deep boredom problem, what Pessoa calls tedium:

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because
there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of
feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that
the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.

I can totally relate to this quote and attest to the ineffectiveness or even negative effect most tech toys have in alleviating my chronic diminished motivation and under-functioning reward system.
It's actually not--you're misunderstanding the broken window fallacy.

The classic example goes like this: "Let's break windows and hire people to replace them! That's a stimulus!" OP did not suggest digging holes into the street and filling them, however--fixing road wear-and-tear is an investment in public infrastructure.
The question would be, which LISP? We have too many to choose from :)

Clojure, however, is coming soon.
Russia failed because communism failed. America doesn't need a weak military it needs a strong, positive leader.
Eco's work is tough. So, yes, maybe I'm undervaluing the credit of "translator".
I don't know anyone who describes the rapid changes that are happening as 'HTML5'.
There's an interesting argument from Friedrich Hayek (who's usually considered libertarian-leaning) that that approach is actually less pro-individual-liberty than a government safety net is, because it coerces people to stay in collectivist-type communities like ethnic groups, churches, etc., even if they would prefer to leave them, due to the dependence on the safety nets those groups provide. He argues that having a minimal government safety net would give people more freedom to choose their associations within society, since e.g. leaving the Mormon church would no longer mean losing your main safety net.
yes thats exactly what im looking for, thanks for the terminology, it makes it easier to find what I need if i actually know what I'm looking for.
The problem with the Hayekian view is that it's one-size fits all. People who think Keynesian economics works in certain situations have the great depression to back them up. And they're likely to sympathize with a Hayek type view during good times when there's no need for the government to stimulate demand.
There are five articles in the search results which I found to be quite useful.
The only thing a site like this can "streamline" is the weeding out of the truly incompetent people, pretending to be programmers. But I'd argue that it's not a very hard task anyway.
So, while solving the challenges will be fun for the applicants, it doesn't seem like the service would be of much help to the companies.
> which LISP?

Arc. Obviously. :-)
Then pay attention, I guess?

Nearly everyone is now using HTML5 in that sense.
You're right. Although I don't think Microdata is quite important enough to be in the main ten, I should have mentioned it in "All The Others". If you post your comment to the blog I'll acknowledge that there.
Be Positive - Strive for Balance
> If it is a fact, where is the data?

Play Sim City and try to win. Check into the facts that Sim City was built upon.

> I hope we cut down on military spending because I think war is bad

All reasonable people think this. When the rest do then we will have autonomous world peace. Until then, we need peacemakers.
Those who started out as programmers at the beginning of the computing era and who remain in the same field of computer science are of course, going to be experts in their fields due to years of accumulated experience, knowledge and skill.

So while the guy has made his points, I wonder, is this a classic case of survivalship bias? Just like when I hear people say, "They don't make houses like they use to." - isn't this the same? What if, the mediocre programmers of the past have simply moved on to other fields?

And of course, as many people have already commented, there remains many programmers who continue to work quite close to the metal. However, while their area of expertise lies in building embedded software systems, I would not automatically assume they are going to be fantastic at, say scaling a website to serve up to 100 million live views per day.
thank you, I appreciated you taking the time to answer. As with other comments on this thead, this is exactly the info I was looking for.
Just like to say I've been really enjoying your contributions to Hacker News. And thanks for the link to the Summers paper, will give that a read.

Thinking about your point though, isn't it more important that the average person understands economics so that they don't vote for economically/financially illiterate policies/politicians?
JQuery.fracs - determine the visible fractions of an element
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

- Eric S. Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
This, to me, is exactly the problem with most GUIs. If you're spending 80 percent of your time doing a handful of simple, repeatable operations, you might as well be using a typewriter. Programs that force you to work that way are the worst kind of chains.
Reeder: Reinventing the way we use RSS Readers
Have you found any other universal applications that can be as good as Reeder? Shoot!
In case people didn't know this, this is based all out of India. And we have Yuvi Panda (HN:yuvipanda), one of the younger hackers around here, joining them. Can't wait to see how they do.
From vague memory of an article read years ago:

Rice was a lot more labor intensive in that it required more time in the field per food-for-one-person than wheat. It also doesn't store as well nor have bumper crops. So, if you have a bad year, it's hard to have a buffer with which to get by. As a result, the vast majority of the population had to get over themselves, cooperate and comply with spending most of their lives taking care of the rice or else people would starve. Troublemakers who did not cooperate were putting everyone else in clear, near-term risk and were dealt with harshly.
We just moved to valley :)
If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been.

There are a number of reasons this is not the case. I'd wager that a main reason is "re-training takes too much time." If a worker gets laid off, gets his Associate's, and starts something new, well, that's a net positive scenario. He or she produces output in a new field, while the transcription software replaces their old output. Net positive outcome.

You call it "handwaving," but the above happens to many people. This is not some accounting trick economists have developed.
Do they run the message queue on the same box as the gateway server in production? If not then the test he ran isn't a direct comparison (since network latency between the app server & queue isn't accounted for). Running both of those services on the same box isn't great either, since they could slow each other down, and you lose both if the box dies.

Still, very cool, congrats ankrgyl, it's awesome to be able to write stuff like that as an intern!
In a "Long Now" talk [1], science fiction author Vernor Vinge mentions the "software midden heap", the layers of software standing on the shoulders of and papering over the bugs of earlier software layers. Will anyone be able to excise rotting middle layers without breaking software compatibility?

Another example is from Vinge's novel A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY. He describes a software system thousands of years in the future that still uses the time_t epoch. None of the system's space-faring users know the significance of the date 01970, though a few believe it is the date when computers were invented. :)

20 years after the "discovery" ;) of UNIX, Linus began developing a Linux from scratch. Linux is now 20 years old. Is some college student writing a new operating system that will cut the cruft from Linux? Even Linux is far from a clean slate design because it embraces (and extends) POSIX APIs and UNIX conventions.
Will we still be using Linux (or Linux derivative) in 2050? 2010?

[1] Vernor Vinge: “What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?”

http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the-singula...
Like mentioned before, these numbers have been imported from my phone on behalf of other people. I can assure you that my wife doesn't have her phone number in her facebook profile, yet there it is in the list. Likewise, I doubt my accountant has her PAs number on her profile yet there it is along side her FB profile along with an "add friend" link.

Like mentioned before, I'd be surprised that just because I accepted the T&Cs in app that this would be permissible under EU laws if the other party hadn't consented to FB retaining their number.
Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects (Updated)
Read the article:

"We hope that not only will
dropping this info demonstrate the inherently corrupt nature of law enforcement
using their own words, as well as result in possibly humiliation, firings, and
possible charges against several officers, but that it will also disrupt and
sabotage their ability to communicate and terrorize communities.

We are doing this in solidarity with Topiary and the Anonymous PayPal LOIC
defendants as well as all other political prisoners who are facing the gun of
the crooked court system. We stand in support of all those who struggle against
the injustices of the state and capitalism using whatever tactics are most
effective, even if that means breaking their laws in order to expose their
corruption. You may bust a few of us, but we greatly outnumber you, and you can
never stop us from continuing to destroy your systems and leak your data."
For the sake of comparison, there is a site with a similar aim that was mentioned here earlier. http://www.codeeval.com/
‪Doodling in Math Class: Squiggle Inception
A feature suggestion from me:
- Allow the recruiter to decide what he's looking for in the code. e.g. Complexity / Efficiency / Clean maintainable code / OO Principles, etc.

The biggest problem I have with job interview style 'coding puzzles' - is that the code that is optimum to solving the solution is actually not code I would want to write day to day and wouldn't be code I would want to work with day to day.

The reason is because in my line of work, we are working with good clean, maintainable code, using good OO principles. This includes naming of variables, naming of functions and accounting for extendibility and maintainability from the ground up.

However, most of these coding puzzles, will be looking for people to write the 'simplest' / 'most elegant' solution to the problem, often leaning towards efficiency or using the least number of lines / characters.

For example, the variables will be 'x', 'y', 'a', 'b', everything will be manipulated through integer 'index' and complex reg exp's may often feature as short cuts to longer code.

- Now there's nothing wrong with the solution this produces. However, overall coding style I prefer is maintainable and easily readable. Variable names have meaning, we work with concrete objects and each piece of complexity is broken into separate functions / classes.

Neither solution is wrong, but the approach to either is completely different and for a interviewee it's often hard to know which path I should be treading when writing the sample code.

On the one hand, the interviewer may think I lack any forethought of maintainability / readability, if I just hack together something quickly using single character variables.

On the other hand, the interviewer may think I'm adding too much bloat / taking too long by using full naming and creating my objects to handle what I want to achieve.
Also, there is http://www.coderloop.com/
This is basically a manifestation of the "LISP Curse" - high level functional languages are sufficiently powerful that small teams of really smart people (like us) can crank out amazing applications with relatively low effort.

However, to maintain and improve these applications, you need to maintain and grow a pool of really smart people, which is something of a challenge for large companies. We tend to be like cats - very fascinated for short periods of time but unwilling to listen to non-technical direction issued by a bunch of MBA's.

It's far easier - for a non-technical person - to assemble a horde of average developers using a pre-packaged toolkit (Java, Microsoft, SAP, or enterprise software packages) and boss them through some form of digitized process map. Let them hire a bunch of their B-school buddies at ACN or Mckinsey to "faciliate" the deployment, for $300 - $500 per hour, and it's a lock.

Big companies don't care about technical excellence - they care about ensuring the company, not the developer, controls the code. The truth of the matter - developers are not created equal and you will get a lot farther in a small group if you let your best person carry the ball.

Unfortunately we're comparing archers and crossbowmen - the archer took YEARS to train but delivered (for his time) an awesome rate of fire with good accuracy. The Crossbow allowed you to herd together large groups of average peasants and overcome the archer by sheer weight of numbers.
Given the two lawyers, why does the lawyer working for the copyright holders look like somebody you would expect to represent guys named Guido?

It disgusts me that anybody could think someone providing open wifi is negligent. It is not my sworn duty to protect copyright holders' material, after all.