skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's like arguing about what colour is the best. It's pointless.

I have a theory that people act this way because of evolution.

--------------------

Imagine you live in a tribe of 10 people, and there are 5 different ways the entire tribe can use to hunt animals for food. All 10 people must hunt together, and each of the 5 ways are equally successful.

After an animal is killed, the tribe determines who was most responsible for the kill, and he/she gets to pick and eat the tastiest meat before anyone else. Others' still get to eat, but it doesn't taste as good.

If all 10 hunters are equally skilled, each will get tasty meat 10% of the time regardless of the hunting method. But humans are not all equally skilled. Some can throw spears better than others. Some can run fast. Some can sneak up quietly. Some can climb trees. Some can wrestle a wild bore.

So what happens? Before a hunt, if you're a fast runner, you say "Let's chase after an animal!" If you can climb trees, you say "No, let's drive an animal up a tree, and climb up to kill it!" You push for the option which gives you the best chance eating tasty meat, and do everything you can to stop any other hunting methods.

Things get political. Someone says; "Running after animals is too much work! Lets climb trees instead!" You say; "Bullshit! Climbing up trees is for pussies. Real hunters run after their food! Plus, we have to see your nasty balls every time you climb up!" You support your cause, and do everything you can to demonize and discredit other options.

Through politics, arguments and fights, you might be able to sway the majority opinion of your tribe in your favor. "Yeah, I guess I don't really like climbing trees either; I'm sick of seeing that guys balls too. Let's run instead!" Now, your entire tribe runs for food, and being the fastest runner, you get tasty meat more than 10% of the time.

--------------------

So my theory goes, when you see someone arguing about something pointless like Windows is better than Linux, even though both are pretty good, what they're really trying to do is sway the opinion of the entire world in their direction. If every company dropped Linux in support of Windows, there would be a lot of Linux sys-admins and programmers out of work. Sure, they could learn Windows, just like a slow runner could learn how to run fast, but they would be at a disadvantage compared to seasoned Windows admins.

The same thing happens with programming languages and APIs. These can be very volatile, going from extremely popular and hot, to nobody wants to touch them in a few years.

When you see someone arguing about what color is better, they're using the same algorithm, only it's firing on something seemingly trivial. But is is? Perhaps if you convince enough people that red is better than blue, the next Macbook Pro you want to buy will end up red instead of blue. Unlikely, but possible...
Sencha - http://www.sencha.com/
The problem with cities is they tend to outbreed their space and resources, bringing rivalry due to a sense of scarcity. But the anonymity of cities enables people to reinvent themselves and explore unpopular ideas in ways that would be impossible or forbidden in the tribal environment of conformity and oppression. A tribe might be tolerable if I could choose one with smart, open-minded members, but most are trapped in the hellhole they were randomly born into.
I find your explanation somewhat disingenuous, which kind of illustrates why I distrust this company and it's culture.

Nedap voting machines were proven to be insecure, and Nedap tried everything to keep that quiet, including legal threats against those who disclosed those vulnerabilities. The way Nedap tried to manipulate political opinion with half truths and misdirection was also rather dubious.

And yes, it was very specifically Nedap's machines that were the subject of discussion in the Netherlands, Ireland and Germany.
These old CF developers are, in my anecdotal experience, the kind people that learned one type of development and stuck with it for a long, long time.

That's basically the majority of developers, in any language.

I'm not going to bother defending the mindset of the author, though I suggest that if you examine concepts like toolset familiarity, code craftsmanship, and zen, you may see that his way is a path to happiness. (and honestly, from what I recall of CF in my college days, I liked it no less than PHP)
I'm working on a Free/Open Source startup named "Least Authority Enterprises". We contribute all of our work (so far) to the Tahoe-LAFS project and we sell secure cloud storage service. I, too, am eager to learn about this topic, as I feel like a babe in the woods and need any glimmers of insight I can find.
Will Amazon's new tablet rival the iPad?
(1) I have respect for people who can put a project together and get revenue flowing through it.

(2) This technology stack sucks.

(3) That your technology stack sucks does not mean you suck.

(4) Maslow's Four Stages of Competence starts with Unconscious Incompetence. You don't even know you are unskilled. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence)

(5) This isn't a popularity contest. (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) Being cool and being in the in-crowd has nothing to do with your technology stack. That goes for nerds too (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)

(6) The tone of this article is defensive. The issues relates to identity, not technology.

(7) Relax, people.
Floating in Dead Sea for 20 minutes help diabetics
Doesn't work for me... probably have cookies?
I don't hang out with a lot of programmers and I guess this is the reason. This "laughing" the op alludes to.

Actually, what this means is that you shouldn't hang out with douchbags, programmers or not. As I can guarantee you, there are just many non-techie douchbags as there are techie ones.
Google Plus forces us to discuss identity
The spec pegs it to a "mostly arbitrary" 5MB but solicits suggestions for something better. I think some platforms now can prompt the user to ask if they want to use more space, but that might only be iOS, and its still limited to some amount.
Hmm, that would mean no Gmail for anyone in Pakistan. Any service that uses SSL for logins would also become unusable if SSL was banned.

I don't see any mention of a wholesale ban on encryption, only the use of encryption for privacy purposes. So, port 443 might still be open. It's still pretty easy to distinguish between HTTPS traffic and VPN traffic, though.
* LLCs are corporations.

* My understanding is all YC companies are C-corps.

* That's because LLC's and S-Corps have limitations on shareholders and share classes.

* The C.W. is that any major external investor is going to rip up your corp structure no matter what you do.

* It's almost certainly not the case that YC would turn town a promising team because they were already an LLC. The principals just need to unanimously agree to convert.

* You should get some kind of limited liability structure ASAP when you start, because until you do, most/all of your company obligations attach themselves to your credit, your assets, your mortgage, &c.

* Of the limited liability structures available to you, LLCs are the fastest and cheapest. S-Corp and C-Corp only change taxation and equity structure.
I'm not convinced that SCCS is worse than CVS
It doesn't have to be this way, and individual fields can break away (to a greater or lesser extent). For instance:

In Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics, the professional society (Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL) was its own publisher, with no profit motive, and so authors for its conferences and journal never signed over copyright (merely granted permission to ACL to publish the work). For years, it was quite standard for nearly all of the authors to post PS or PDF versions of their papers on their own websites. Then ACL started accepting PDF instead of camera-ready, and just posted the PDFs themselves; and then they started scanning the back-catalogue.

The result of this is that the vast majority of all NLP/CL papers ever written (excluding only those published elsewhere, e.g. in AAAI, and a very few missing proceedings from fifty years ago) are available online, for free, in PDF, at http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ .

This is how science should be.
Show HN: Chat in a virtual world - Node Knockout entry
I think they just blocked standart VPN ports as it has been done here, in China. To effectively block users from accessing unwanted content censors have to block all (or most) foreign ip addresses, but I don't think it will ever happen anywhere.
Light Blue Bed In A Bag
Wikipedia already has an article about the phenomenon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_lens
What? So you think Java is not expressive enough for business logic, and you think it's better to move that logic to PLSQL? Seriously?

Java may not be the best language for some things, and that's why you use DSLs, but moving that to the place you store the data is probably the worst thing you can do 99% of the time.
IIRC, YC has pro rata rights... So it's not a foregone conclusion that they were diluted in both rounds. But yeah-- High five, YC!
Who, exactly, will it hurt?
Strangely, when I follow your link and click the top link, I still only get 2 paragraphs. If I do my own google search (paste your search query into a fresh google search box), I get the whole article..
I stand by my comment. A few things to note.

> Some people write crappy code in CFML.
Yes. But people write crappy code in [your preferred language] too.

No, I said CFML code is universally hard to understand. Even more so for people already familiar with more popular languages.

> OMG can you believe some people still use TABLES???
view source.

That example was given to make a point about dated skill sets. I didn't imply that your Tumblr blog was table based.

Edit:

To InnocentB's point about HN's HTML. Does anyone here think HN's markup is meant at all to be inspirational? My take has always been that pg has priorities, and a layout for HN firmly based on cleaner HTML & CSS isn't high on that list.
What I find sad is people making judgements based on twelve year old information. Like most languages CFML has evolved.

People writing CFML today use MVC frameworks, use ORM and the cloud. Yes it is still easy for beginners to write bad code, I think that may be more true in ColdFusion than in other languages. But getting started easily can also be a virtue.

You might be surprised but a lot of the ColdFusion community don't have tunnel vision and are familiar with a lot of other languages.

http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2061-Seven-Languages-In-Seven-W...

http://corfield.org/blog/post.cfm/learning-clojure

Sometimes another language is a better choice for a given task. We write CFML because we like it and are more productive in it, even if it isn't cool.
We parked next to Steve's SL when we visited the Apple campus last year. I was so excited :)

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4964941&l=43d69d58...
repetition of the same old story from century and a half ago about Smith and Wesson, etc...
The assembly vs ruby analogy is indeed a stretch, but I get your point. Still, what you're talking about boils down to objective discussion and that's something I really like. My problem is with those folks who, instead of having sane debates, get all religious with their programming language(s) of choice.
You're wrong.

You can create a git repository that has other git repositories in it (submodules) but you can't checkout an arbitrary subtree of a git repository. I spent a long amount of time searching for this, so I know.

Now, people have written scripts that will convert a directory to a git submodule by moving history around and stuff like that, but you need to check out the whole repository first.
I think he's referring to Hacker News, which is table-based.
Do you (the plural you) really trust Dropbox Inc. enough to give them access to all your application files on your servers?

Personally I don't use Dropbox for anything minimally sensitive (basically, anything that I haven't downloaded from the web) without putting it on a Truecrypt container. Maybe I'm just paranoid, though.
I know, I know. I just seem to have a knack to draw all the d-bag ones for some reason. That's why I mostly stick to hn these days. I like it here.
Why Smart Investors Systematically Undervalue SEO
The goal of the Pakistani government seems to be the complete obliteration of all private communications. But the only way to do that is by banning all communication.

With the ban on VPNs, steganographic[1] techniques that make encrypted traffic look like regular traffic will become more and more common. The troubling thing is the fact that these techniques are somewhat hungry for bandwidth.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
> That's basically the majority of developers, in any language.

You have a point there, but I'd argue that on a platform like the web the impact of skill stagnation is much bigger.
Thanks for noting that, will fix.
In Iran, in the days we had protests, they dropped all encrypted connections as well. That makes internet simply unusable. I hope this would never come to Iran, although I believe it will. Soon.
I spoke to him only a few weeks ago. An amazing individual, unassuming and would chat with everyone. It's very sad to hear the bad news.
Thanks! Though, it looks like I am indeed stuck with a battery that's a significant fraction of the machine's (used) price. At least the one you point to (top result, from Energy+) has a majority of good reviews and might actually live up to its specs.
>These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right.

Is there are good replacement for HTML tables yet that works well in all browsers?

I'm talking about for things that actually need to be laid out in a grid, which, in my experience, is many things. Grids are fairly fundamental to layout and design.
I can only speak for myself, but when i hear of linear algebra, I think of my 'linear algebra for scientists/mathematicians' course in college.

The math behind signal processing; I only took 2 classes in college, and boith were pretty hand-wavey (granted, it's hard to rigorously cover S and Z transforms when you know 100% of the class hasn't taken and probably never will take complex analysis.
I don't understand what's so difficult about holding the following facts in your head at once:

1. Better tools make you more productive and make larger problems tractable. Using outdated or subpar tools seriously limits your options, especially if you need to compete with professionals. The simpler your problems, the less this matters.

2. It's easy to get sucked in to constantly learning the new language/framework/toolset when you enjoy learning these things, finding the balance between the diminishing returns of trying out new tech and being highly productive is difficult. Welcome to life.

3. Some people on the internet loudly engage in ignorant fanboyism, especially if they see smart people using their new piece of tech and figure they got onto a good idea early.

4. That same fanboyism defends crappy tools because it's human nature to feel that kind of tribal defensiveness when you've invested a lot of time learning and using something, this is especially strong when someone has all or most of their experience with a single tool or set of tools.

Here's an idea: in the real world tools and productivity are tied in a complicated way.

The comments "it doesn't matter what you use, just keep getting things done!" is just as stupid as "stop working on things and upgrade your skillset immediately!".

Since this is aimed more at the commenters than at pud's submission I will say to him: You are impressively productive with that tech stack, it really doesn't look like it would be difficult for you to move to something more powerful than cold fusion at least. You seem like a pragmatic guy who can see the future payoff from that investment. You also look like a young guy who should not be ignoring the kind of commitment to life long learning necessary to compete in this industry.
We forget the value of curation.

Why can a boutique shop sell a $50 dress for $200? Taste. One could simply walk into that boutique, confident that 20 minutes later a cute, fashionable and well-fitting dress would be acquired.

Why can top universities charge so much for tuition? Every year, %s University generates a curated list of individuals, and many hiring processes (not to mention ad-hoc interpersonal filtering processes) emphasize individuals in that list. Like boutique shopping, this is an expensive strategy that often excludes superior talent, but is fast.

Is it worth $200,000 to have one's name on that list? Apparently.

Is it worth application fees and an iron publishing agreement to have one's paper published in Nature. Apparently.
In a traditional shrouded turbine every additional foot of tower height would require, at a minimum, 2*pi feet of additional circumference to the shroud (in the case of the design that started this discussion it appears that the shroud is the main structural element so it is a bit different, but similar principles apply.) The shroud has weight. As the shroud circumference increases it will require both a stronger tower and stronger internal supports to handle the ever-increasing weight of the shroud. It is not hard to see that as the weight of the shroud increases most of the tower and most of the structural mass of the shroud becomes dedicated to holding up the shroud itself and an ever increasing proportion of the tower/shroud mass is dedicated to holding up the extra mass that is only necessary to keep the rest of the shroud from collapsing (e.g. structural mass to hold up the structural mass that is keeping the shroud up), with an appropriate increase in the cost of the tower. The exponent is probably closer to 1.1 than to 2 or more, but exponential is the proper term here.
The web page at http://xeround.com/ is currently unavailable. It may be overloaded or down for maintenance.

HTTP Error 503 (Service Unavailable): The server is currently unable to handle the request. This code indicates that this is a temporary condition and that the server will be up again after a delay.
I love using Sequel Pro for MySQL, but also wish it had support for SQLite and PostgreSQL. It's a great app and better than all the other OSX clients that I can find on the internet, including the non-free ones.

It's open source, so nothing's stopping anyone from adding support for other SQL servers.
Do they still limit the usage of user defined functions and contrib modules, or did that open up? I would love to use Heroku for some lightweight data warehousing that I've got going, but it's still pretty dependent on functions/sprocs for performance reasons.

I looked for any more documentation about that, but the only official word I have from them in the past is the support ticket I filed last year stating that they don't support "additions" like user defined functions or the various contrib modules.
> view source

Are you trying to tell me that PG is not a web designer?!
A brief Google search confirms that "lost my files" wasn't solved in 1995. I'm pretty sure those aren't all Mac users. Even if 90% are due to other issues, there are many people who would like their data back. I believe many are due to the ease with which a user can delete files compared to the difficulty they experience when restoring them.

The dangerous button is much easier to find than the fix-it button. One is right there, with your files. The other is someplace else, related by metaphor alone. Once you have selected the recycle bin you then have to search through your very long deleted file list, select the file you want, select another button to restore it (which appears in the same place as a different button existed before selecting the file), and then navigate back to the place you were expecting the file to be. We're talking about users who can't figure out a menu, but they can perform this multi-step task. I can easily see a new computer user screwing this up.

Next time you look at the context menu of a removable drive, see that "Format" is right there with the eject menu item. One should be used every time you use the drive, the other very rarely and only when you're sure. The latter should be removed to a sub-menu under "advanced", or similar.

Myself, I'd make it harder to delete things and a lot easier to find them again.
No thread on population growth is complete without a reference to Dr. Al Bartlett's famous lecture, "Arithmetic, Population and Energy" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&list=PL63DAFC... :-).
Well, the article said:

> Authority prohibited usage of all such mechanisms including encrypted virtual private networks (EVPNs) which conceal communication to the extent that prohibits monitoring.

They sure can't monitor your email if you're using SSL, so I'd wager that yes, if you have gmail and live in Pakistan, now would be a great time to back it all up.
For a similar service using MySQL you can try http://xeround.com/.
(Disclaimer: I haven't tried it myself and have no association with them)
While they are the most population-dense areas and are growing faster than other places in the world, I'm pretty sure it's more likely that the 7 billionth person won't be born in India or China.

It takes all of 2 mins to calculate. All facts from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

Birth rate world-wide: 20.3/1000. Population: 7 billion :-)

Total # births: ~ 142 million.

Birth rate India: 23/1000. Population: 1.2 billion.

Total # births: 27.6 million.

Birth rate China: 13/1000. (That should surprise people). Population: 1.34 billion.

Total # births: 17.4 billion.

Therefore the odds of it being India or China is ~ (17.4+27.6)/142 ~ 31%.

Fact: Considering that No country has a birth rate larger than 3x India and only China has a population larger than India, India has the maximum # births/year in the world.
> Doctors used to bleed people with leeches to get out the "bad humors". They stopped using that "tool" for a reason. It was a bad tool, and better "tools" came along.

Bad example. Leeches are still in use today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirudotherapy#Today
Using `display: table` is a great way to lay out your elements in a grid while keeping your HTML semantic.
>It is Microsoft's own doing that they made their users get used to interfaces like this

Jesus, the amount of Microsoft-bashing in on this article is insane.
I agree with what you said about developers understanding what does on under the curtains, but regarding the NewRelic statement, I couldn't disagree more with this.

Spending time early on in the project on things that don't matter and that don't really impact the system, like the example given in the post, is exactly the kind of thing that ends up creating projects that are expensive to maintain and just bad.

Focusing on solving large performance bottlenecks, that can easily improve things 1000 times more than fixing that simple example is a much better use of your time, and is what newRelic shows you.
This read like a fortune cookie.

"Orange is cautious and carefree."

Can one be cautiously carefree?
Cool idea, but I stopped watched the video after about 1 minute. I think you need to get to your sell faster. Like a newspaper article get to the point first, then fill in the details. Don't make me listen to you describe how to save a file in Photoshop for the first 1/3.
I deleted all WSJ cookies then clicked the link from the Google search results and it worked.
Or these guys:

http://www.rocstock.org/roctober.html
*the startup