skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The original statement was "A real currency is widely accepted, gold is not". The following question was "Where is gold not accepted?"

My reply of "At the supermarket" is, I think, a succinct and correct response about the basic difference between currency and valuables. My local supermarket won't take US dollars either since I'm not in the USA. You know well enough that supermarkets in the USA do take dollars, and no supermarket anywhere takes gold (if you find one, let me know what it gives as change). The point still stands. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate more information on why along with the down-votes.
China, America, and Copycat Economics
Croatia Holidays
That seems fun! I remember loving this kind of chat 10 years ago when using ICQ.
But on my side it seems buggy. If I connect to myself, one in Firefox and one in chrome (under linux) only the chrome one is "connected" not the firefox part.
If i try with a friend under chrome and me under firefox, I see him type but he does not see anything!

Possibility to erase what was typed before could be fun too.

EDIT: tried again and my friend has a message asking him to give me the same URL I gave him but we are not connected together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du_RTMmofWM
" Why are the world's most dangerous men invariably from major oil producing countries?"
Natural resources have a way of corrupting the society. I even did a project on the correlation between corruption and natural resources as a part of GDP.
Here's a link , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
How HP And webOS Could Have Won
it's an extrapolation of a consistent and
systematic trend

It's a shitty extrapolation to me, just because the fertility rate has been dropping since the sixties (a period of economic growth, following after a world war btw).

2000 years ago the world population was somewhere around 300 million people. Today we are at 6.94 billion people. That's clearly exponential growth.
One of the worst thing about this industry is the constant idolization of programmers, and languages by below average programmers.
'Wormhole' links MIT and Stanford
There are lots of scenarios when this comes up:

- braindead configuaration files.
- data files that need some massaging
- commenting out code blocks in languages which need a prefix comment delimiter on each line (e.g. python's # or haskell's --)
- any time you are doing a series of operations calling functions in a module or from a single class/object and the name changes (e.g. foo.x();, foo.y(); foo.z(); and so on);
That's career focused, driven women will bread themselves out of existence? I would think genes from fathers with the same traits would have a counter balancing effect.
Also in the realm of headline-seeking predictions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

In defense of their thesis, the authors of that book maintain perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future
Uh oh...I ordered 1 yesterday at 9:15 AM. No emails yet, but this makes me more than a little worried...
Interesting point, I guess we need to know to what extent this behaviour is genetic.

If there is something in society that causes women not to want to have kids and this remains in place then the prediction is correct.

This is a nature versus nurture debate.
I really like the aesthetics but as mentioned here it's not portable / shareable offline.
In addition - more than the fact that you need a modern browser (which is ok, really), you need a modern projector for such a resolution, and this is nothing you can just download and install.

Nothing is more awkward than displaying such a presentation on a backwards projector which cuts it off.

I use this regularily, which solves both problems:
https://github.com/geraldb/slideshow

I plan to use this from now on, since it has nicer UI:
https://github.com/juliocesar/shining

For deck.js to be perfect it

- needs to understand markdown

- needs to use precent (%) scaling so it could scale resolutions easily

- export to an offline format.

All in all it has astonishing UI effects which makes me want to use it.
I have g+ open pretty much 24/7. A chrome addon alerts me if there's anything interesting. Do I spend countless hours on social sites then, or only when I actually look at it?

If the latter, then about 15 minutes a day.
From Estonia to Boston: GrabCAD Looks to Play Big Role in Boston’s Tech Future
Why HP's Departure from the PC Business Was Inevitable
Free webbook on data-structs & algorithms, for Ruby/C/C++/Python/Java,Lua
What are the docs created in?
http://imakewebthings.github.com/deck.js/docs/

Beautiful.. would love to do something similar.
If HP was releasing a TouchPad 2 at that price point, it could potentially be a game changer, but they aren't.

It's a fire sale on soon-to-be unsupported technology.
If this behavior is genetic our future will look something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
New Twitter feature: media grid
Many companies conflate having an API with being a "true platform."

Additionally, we are all witnessing the pussification of the word platform. It used describe something that was more fundamental, more plumbing and infrastructure that others used to build separate and often wholly distinct businesses (i.e. Farmville on the Facebook Platform). But the new watered down platform is any web app with an API that allows mixing Nyan Cats with Foursquare and raising $42MM.

Most web apps should provide an API. Almost none of those will become platforms. So be it.
Japan struggles to rebuild, leaving lives in limbo
I love these new projects for building web based presentations. Back in 2003 I had to take a speech course and quickly got sick of every presentation where someone would be abusing PowerPoint with an abundance of typewriter and laser animations. I started writing all my presentations in HTML/Javascript and editing together compilation videos to stand out. Looking back it was a great way to practice the craft.
How Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring.
$99 TouchPad a hit, as Ubuntu and Android ports emerge
I'd like to know exactly where Arrington is coming from with the prices he has mentioned.

Without providing evidence, he did say that there is a strong possibility of these devices being made at the prices he has mentioned.

It would be a lower-quality product for sure and terms like a "good enough capacitive touch screen" bother me.
There's only one problem that's holding me back from switching to HTML/SVG/CSS/JS for my slides: the problem of monitor/projector resolution scale. Most projectors I've presented on had a low resolution: 640x480 or 800x600. Let's say my monitor has a 1600x900 resolution, so if I develop in that resolution, my presentation would break (or at least it wouldn't look as I expect it to). Presentation software and PDF viewers take care of that for me: what you see on the screen is what you would get on the projector (i.e. the text and graphics would have the same relative height&width as on the screen). Is there any reliable way to achieve that in HTML presentations as well?
Oops, my bad, the book for Lua has not been written yet:
http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus9/

And it's C#, not C
http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus6/
Ask HN: Resources for a self taught developer to "fill the CS gap"?
I'm a self taught programmer without a computer science background but some development experience both as an in house developer and a freelancer. Recently I've been doing a lot of work in Python (some standalone and some Web stuff with Django) and I'm looking for ways to specialise more in Python/ Django development and particularly to fill any knowledge gaps likely to have crept in through not having a CS background.

Has anyone out there been in a similar position and if so what resources have you found valuable to "fill the CS gap" and generally ensure credibility as a developer without a CS background?
"Best practices" are neither a hard science nor immutable. They are derived from observations about what works and what doesn't and are, therefore, subject to change over time as technology evolves. It's important to remember science, as in "what we understand about the world" also changes. What doesn't is the scientific method.

Did you read the text I pointed you to?
I've seen this a few times, and refreshing always fixed it... unless your friend is on Firefox 3, which we don't support.
Ask Guido: Why would you use the return statement? Couldn't you just use print?
That's very recent in civilizational terms.
40 years of paper money and floating exchange rates
I think you're overreacting - at least I simply interpreted the comment as being amazed at the amount of preparation - and that they could have faked it, had they wanted to (even though s/he doesn't think they actually did). Of course my interpretation may be wrong...
> And when I think "word processor software," Microsoft Word usually springs to mind.

Reading this, I immediately thought: Volkswriter. Nice to see the author landed there too. I remember those cheat sheet templates we used to overlay on our function keys for programs like Volkswriter and, later, WordPerfect.
You'd first have to show correlation between some genetic factor and women who don't want families. It seems just as likely to me that our current societies simply does not value or reward reproducing, and in some cases, outright punishes child rearing with impoverishment or being socially exiled.
True, after going through the comments again, getting an old Mac mini is going to make more sense than getting a new Mac.
This downvote == disagreeing is so annoying, this prevents discussions.
It is one thing when someone gives an upvote for agreeing but downvotes are for insulting and off topic posts.
Hmmm he is using chrome 5, I tried with latest firefox and chrome too but does not work even after 10 refresh from him or me.
I fucking hate PDF on the browser. It's very slow to download, take up huge resources, hard/not lenient in re-sizing and is the worst choice for presentations.

This is a lot better choice, but each scenario has different needs. PDF is good for books, and long documents.
Afaik, all builtin functions are considered to be atomic.

Wouldn't it be enough to have a mutex for each object and when such a builtin function is called, all objects which are passed as parameters (including and esp. `self`) are locked?
I don't understand. Wouldn't network IO latency be higher than memory access? and wouldn't that beat the purpose of having a memcache?
Why do projects still use mailing lists for support?
Mailing lists seem to be less easy to navigate and search, and the hierarchy of messages is more confusing than a message board. You can't add keyword indeces, and the UI is often worse.

If people want a minimalist interface or an email interface to a support and discussion website, I'm sure an API could be built for an otherwise full-featured site.
Love CoffeeScript, but yeah omitting parens makes it hard to read in this case. I follow Visual Basic convention. Use parentheses when using the return value. In this case, the constructor function returns an object. Omit parentheses otherwise, i.e. using a function as a method (no return value).
A better title might be "Ask HN: Resources for developers without a computer science background to fill skill gaps" I can't change it with the Edit option unfortunately.
WebOS gui is written in javascript with hooks into the hardware. In fact its so easy to modify you can download the ipks from preware and see that they are shellscripts of patchdiffs to different parts of the system. Want to turn on the flashlight from the menubar? There is a JS function call in the system library for that.

My first exposure to it was disabling the CDMA radio, from javascript, and enabling wifi. I was using a Sprint Pre for development in a country where only GSM exists. To get past the initial setup screen I configured the system to use wifi instead of GPRS.

The great thing about WebOS was it was open in the literal sense (unfortunately, not the license) you could modify every aspect of the system using javascript and CSS. There is nothing else like it in the world. Not Android, not WP7 and definitely not iOS
The day someone can code as well as me and my fellow computer science graduates for <= $10 / hour will be a great day (if it ever arrives) - I'd be happy to code alongside a team of a couple of people on a new startup idea (or hire a few at $10 an hour for my own startup).
It's something like the Big Mac Index. You can't derive the entire state of the economy from it but it sure helps put some things in perspective.

It's certainly easier to visualize than saying "the net reproduction rate of Hong Kong is 0.547".
I'm a fan of LESS. It's great. I'm a bigger fan of SASS (and I means .sass not .scss), but that's because of the syntax.

Whenever someone is evangelizing LESS they mention how it's better because it can be compiled on the browser via javascript. However they will also often mention that you wouldn't want to do this in production (I agree) which means setting up server side compilation (run time by the server) or design time compilation (thick client / command line).

So... what's the value in browser based javascript interpretation / compilation if you shouldn't be using it in production anyways?

I would even argue it's a negative in that it could encourage the bad practice of browser compilation.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22fusion+codicil%22

Works for me. Un-percented quotation marks are not valid URL characters. What browser let you copy them out of the URL bar without escaping them?
If someone finds a way to cheaply produce Gold, most of our problems would be solved.

Once humanakind has the ability to cheaply produce elements, we can start building food replicators.
The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was really unstable--Neil Armstrong actually almost crashed in it, but was able to eject just in time, before it crashed into the ground.

Armstrong was always known for being cool under pressure, and people were amazed that he just kept on working that day after nearly being killed.
Odd. I can't seem to reproduce this. Anyone else?
An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance
"The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure."

Just imagine how many people were left out of jobs when cars appeared! (in relation to the recent topic of automation)
Javascript self-invoking functions explained line by line
INSTANTLY crashes Safari 5.0.5 on OSX 10.6.8
works great in Chrome 7.0.517.41 on OSX 10.6.8

Been using it for 20 minutes, works great, and I love seeing
the typing/mistakes correction.. Parsing links would be helpful.

OK, now friend says I was disconnected ("User Disconnected") on his end and there was no message for me on my end.

Can reload page and it resumes same chat, without previous chat but same user.
By hand, not generated. But feel free to steal.
The 'CEO singleton' - very funny. :)

However, I'm all for domain modeling in the beginning, for a beginner. I learned OO the hard way - all by myself and pouring over books. I agree with the OP that a vehicle or duck was not a good model. Having worked with databases and crm's in the past (before they were 'crm's), I always dealt with people, organizations, calls, notes, etc. So when I came across an infamous car example, I was always wondering 'this has no bearing on anything I would do - why not talk about real objects like people?'.

Even before hitting any kind of patterns, it's crucial (in my mind) to understand datatypes, methods, scoping, inheritance, etc. 3 Simple classes like Person, Address, Organization can go a long way.

In my mind, there's no way a beginner is going to understand patterns first. They have to be shown the basics and the have to be handheld when entering the OO way of thinking. One those first few steps are taken, then it paves the way for more complex examples and patterns.
This isn't the first such library and I doubt it's the last. Until any authoring tool can export to this format these libraries are always going to be curiosities.
Dark Of The Moon DVD
Yesterday I started a comment asking if I'm the only programmer that doesn't keep many notes. I actually don't keep that many, relying on my memory and falling back to code comments, revision history, and email when that fails.

But then as I read through more comments, I realized that I've tried almost every one of these note systems - Tiddlywiki, TODO.txt, Evernote, Springpad, OneNote, Moleskine notebooks and others - but have never stuck with any of them. The only system that's ever stuck for me is email. I keep trying to get better at recapping meetings and decisions in email so I can find them later.
Today I launched my solo project, Listry. Feedback/suggestions appreciated
This looks very nice. I use slidedown[1] right now (Ruby + jQuery). There, slides are written as one Markdown file and then slideshow builds that into a presentation (the Javascript gets included in the file). I could imagine writing a small script to automate doing a similar thing here. (Not really necessary, but I like that workflow.)

The only extra I'm missing right away is a simple, built-in way to embed code blocks with some kind of syntax highlighting. (Slidedown uses Pygments + a simple custom syntax to specify language.) Probably shouldn't be too hard to make an extension that does that.

[1] https://github.com/nakajima/slidedown
SIMD DCT/IDCT in libjpeg-turbo and bit-exactness
Except you left out setting the prototype chain to extend from the super class. CoffeeScript expresses it succinctly. The example above, while readable, already has much more noise than signal.
HP TouchPad: almost no demand at $500

HP TouchPad: almost no demand at $400

HP TouchPad: almost no demand at $380 (only hundreds sold on woot)

HP TouchPad: announced abandoning product and sold unused inventory for cost of recycling

iPhone: people pay up to $1000 per device retail, or up to $1500 per device in some countries
Storing Data the Simple HTML5 Way (and a few tricks you might not have known)
American Express launches Facebook app for 9/11 volunteers
"It's implied that the relationship was used because real ducks are real animals, not because Duck inheriting from Animal is a good idea."

I just do not understand this objection. If you wrote Sim Farm, it's quite possible you'd want Duck to inherit from Bird and Cow and Pig to inherit from Mammal, and both Bird and Mammal to inherit from Animal.

In the course of caring for your farm, you have to fix tractors, grow crops, and care for animals.

All Animals must be fed and will starve if they don't. Why would you code "needs food" on every individual animal class? Birds can get avian flu, and Mammals can get rabies; the pigs can even get rabies from the dogs. Why would you code "can get rabies" on Dog and Pig?

Maybe you don't always want to use Sim Farm as your example for teaching OO, but a lot of working code does model real-world items. Animals and cars and such are no worse than files as objects to model, and have the advantage that non-programmers already know something about them. Hence they can focus on the OO concepts and not on the domain logic.
Then again, hardware transactional memory may be arriving: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4218914/IBM-plants-t...
Hadoop workshop : First success story
China airs documentary proving military university is hacking U.S. targets
I hate discussion sites. I vastly prefer email where I get it all sent to me, can have it stored for easy reference, searching etc.

I would ask if you go to discussion site style, why have a site at all? Why not just have a standard tag people use on stackoverflow?
Could this be analogous to the "Curse of the gifted" but on a geopolitical scale?
Yet another bit of testing social media from Croatia Holidays
This is the project I've been working on for the past 6 months. It combines the features of wikis with a voting system that determines the best parts of an article. There's still a lot of improvements I need to make, but I wanted to launch early and get feedback.
Haha! It's probably good there will only be one per country, then. What an amazing spectacle the world will be!
Codecademy and similar stuff are great for strong programmers.

Why?

Strong programmers doesn't compete with weak programmers. The stuff they can do, and the speed they work is at a totally different level. see the 1000X productivity debate.And it does take years of training to stop being a weak programmer.

To strong programmers, codecademy(and similar tools) will open a lot of opportunities.It would be easier for them to collaborate with business and domain experts.It would be easier to talk with domain experts, easier to prototype and domain experts could offer more help in the development process which will help building partnerships.Those collaborations would open many new collaboration opportunities , and business opportunities.
兰芝官网
Update Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Tanpa Install Ulang
In the FAQ it states "Each Cache Node runs an instance of the Memcached software and has its own DNS name and port". So it looks like it is running memcached and not just talking it.
Firefox. It does this with parentheses as well.

But I thought I'd tried %22 and had it disappear. Could be lack of coffee.
There are many devices which look very similar to the iPad dating back to at least as far as the first series of Star Trek. And there's this electronic newspaper from 1994... http://youtu.be/JBEtPQDQNcI
Could that probably lead to performance issues?
I had a teacher in high school who had her Ph. D in education. She was an immigrant from Greece, and did her Ph. D on ways education could help immigrants make the leap from immigrant to citizen based on her experiences (I don't recall the specifics - high school was a long time ago). For what it's worth, she was the government teacher.

I also have a friend who's getting his Ph. D in early childhood education largely because, after something like five years as a kindergarten teacher, he was astounded at how dumb the other teachers were (he tells stories of co-workers not being able to do basic arithmetic) and how much they depended on materials to actually do their instruction. He views the Ph. D largely as a way to get his foot in the door at someplace where he can design and produce early childhood curricula and help save kids from teachers who have no business in the classroom.

Then again, he also spoke frequently about how much he hated the professors when he was in college because many of them had literally never taught children. They got to college because they had good grades, went to grad school because they had good grades and got professorships because they did good research, but never had to apply what they were studying.

Honestly, it sounds a tremendous amount like computer science.
Highly Engaging Content. More engaging than your friend's profile information?
I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but nobody really _learns_ good practices just by having somebody tell them. They might _use_ them, but _learning_ requires something more. It is important for programmers to think by themselves!

Getting beginners to experiment with their own code is a very natural way of teaching them what is good and what is bad, and why exactly it is good/bad - since they're the ones who'll have to maintain it.

Also, unrelated, but "having fun" is an amazing metric for good code. If some coding activity is boring as hell you're probably 1) on the wrong job or 2) using the wrong abstractions.