skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of curiosity, what replacement to Terminal.app would you recommend? Bonus points if it doesn't involve running X11.
I suggest that Brave New World would be an interesting read for you. The hierarchy of intelligence classes in there I think does hit at a real problem: most work in society is mindless.
Mini-Microsoft: Compensatory Arrangements of Certain (Microsoft) Officers
Apple doesn't even make a single-button mouse any more. The only mouse they make is the Mighty Mouse (which is in my opinion garbage, but that's beside the point).
Sounds bogus.
I disagree. searchyc has always been easy to use and gives good results.
An Automat is a fast food restaurant where foods and drink are served by vending machines.
Stuck on Fixtures
Security Flaw In Yahoo Mail Exposes Plaintext Authentication Info
What App Engine sites would you recommend? I'll be honest: I don't know if I've ever seen one in action.
In my mind Macs are somewhat better suited for end users compared to Windows PCs. But if I should speak for myself, after about 11 years of using only Linux I can somewhat manage to use a Windows system even if I search for icons like a stupid for minutes, but can't absolutely use a Mac system...
Btw my background is fvwm2 that starts with an xterm without decorations open by default.

Anyway the next week I'll own a macbook since I need to put the apps I'm developing for the iPhone using the open toolchain inside the AppStore, so I need the real SDK, I hope I'll be able to use its interface without too problems...

And about Mac Os X "under the hood" I think it's a cool Unix system and one of the few Unix variants that are actively developed today (where actively means: to add innovation).
I'm pretty sure that here on Hacker News there's a pretty even split between Linux and OSX. There's even a pg essay on this phenomenon written a few years back that I'd link for you if I weren't on an iPod touch.

Edit: this should be it:

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html
One is stressful enough.
Well isn't that something.
Have you tried Terminal.app recently? It used to be awful, but current versions (Leopard) are great for me. I stopped using xterm completely and haven't had any issues.
Unit Testing decoupled from Design
Adobe CTO Talks Tough on Google, Microsoft
An interesting analysis of why PHP is so popular
But on the other hand they talk about an Island where they tried to eliminate all mindless work - but the people got bored. They should have set up an Island without mindless works and only "Alphas".
I can sum up my reasoning for using a Mac in two words:

"Pretty UNIX"
HTC Touch Viva Unlocked
The compact design houses an ultra-sensitive touch screen for navigation through contacts, media and web pages with new TouchFLO. The latest in HTC's unique touch screen interface technology. Effortless to use and working in perfect harmony with the phone's main functions.
I'm 10 minutes into it, but he doesn't seem to be using Emacs' Ctrl-R/Ctrl-S. That's ... that's just not civilized.
I kept looking at the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st, but this appears to be real.
If its true, and the datapresser site seems legit (http://datapresser.com/generate_unique_content), it would explain so much.
Their volume of articles really does not seem implausible given their number of writers and the abundace of information. Sure, they put out quite a few articles a day, but if that is their mission, it is not surprising. What they do is far from inhuman.

That said, this product seems like it could be of use for them.
iTerm? Works great for me.
CSI NY 502 Page Turner
“An urgent search for the cause of a series of deaths by radiation poisoning may ultimately lead to a very deadly volume in the New York City Library.”
Californication Slip of the Tongue S02E01 Showtime
It’s the season premiere of Californication, and it starts surprisingly. The show was very quickly renewed for a new season.
Ask HN: Deciding between Haskell & Lisp
Hey folks, I'm going functional and want to decide between the two. Some of my thoughts and concerns are below. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Why I like Haskell:

- It compiles to native code (in GHC)

- It has a grammar

- The type system looks fascinating

- GHC also has native support for Literate Haskell files, which sound pretty useful considering the density of functional code.

- Lazy evaluation looks like a great way to pass around work for threads, or to model certain problems.

- It's nice how they handled side effects ala Monads.

Why I'm still curious about lisp:

- I don't know how to compare CLOS or macros against Haskell's functionality.

- Emacs. A single language across the board could be nice. I've been a long-time user for it, but mostly for imperative languages, org-mode, and latex.

- Connections to old hacker lore & culture. Tons of old stories on Lisp being wonderful, AI research, etc. Considering how simply lisp's survived & evolved over the last 50 (!) years, there's apparently a lot more to the whole thing than I can determine beforehand.

Of course, the real decision is which one becomes my first native functional language, and which one becomes the second. But it's really going to boil down to which one I choose for my next personal dev project. The second will have to be an experimentation platform, based on the lens developed in the former.

I suspect others are in the same situation (for differing reasons) and hope that this thread be useful to them as well.

Thanks in advance!

-Lally
It looks like so far the GNU project has been a huge success.
One minor suggestion: Would it be that hard to allow me to click and drag the panoramas without having to click that hand button first?
Squeak has a learning curve, that's for sure. The language itself it easy, but the environment is so different that it takes some getting used to. I would recommend Squeak By Example (http://squeakbyexample.org/).
>1) I would really like the "hand" mode to be the default. It took me a while to figure out I could change it.

I agree. Auto scroll combined with hover scroll is giving me a headache.

There should also be a way to get the image to hold still when using the hand mode.
Tom Perkins's (of KP) Giant Yacht Sails to San Francisco
Bojam Applies Open Source Principles to Music
Move search to the top of the page.
Actually, datapresser sounds like a very interesting side-project to work on, involving natural language processing and machine learning. I'm pretty impressed, sounds like it could have been a side project turned into a viable startup business.
I'm not sure whether or not it's a joke

I'm not sure whether or not I hope it's a joke.
Stop Complaining about Apple and the App Store
Sounds like fun little subversive marketing campaign from datapresser.
I'd try to start learning both. Spend a few days learning lisp, do as much of it as you can. Then, spend a few days learning Haskell.

After you start picking up on their essence, I'm sure one of them will feel like home more so than the other and you'll understand their individual raisons d'etre.
I love this idea but almost all of my friends think the internet revolves around Facebook so trying to use any of this would never work on them.
I've read quite a number of blog posts recently that have been written in English that's seemed strangely clunky and unnatural, in a style very similar to the intro text on the Datapresser home page.

I initially put it down to posts being authored by people for whom English is a second language, but they're US-based blogs. This initially dodgy-sounding idea starts to seem plausible.
Maybe these are considered steampunk now?

Am I that old?

Maybe I should be submitting more slide-rule articles. Or, better yet, TMRC's System 2:

http://tmrc.mit.edu/progress/images.tcl?year=2002&month=...

Now that is some awesome old technology. I can't believe the link to the audio file is broken! Thank god I visited TMRC to hear this thing in person before they took it to the museum.
You have to remember that it's up to $100k for all your accounts at a bank and not for each one. So say you had $75k in one and $50k in another. You'd be out $25k.

So diversify your cash across banks (although that's harder and harder with all the acquisitions going on).
How to test a simple blog's Django models
testing against the actual database schema
"This is good stuff. I certainly hope frameworks like ramaze stick around and gain their own niche market share. ... I had to get away from Rails. In fact, if other frameworks like Merb, Ramaze, datamapper, and Sequel didn't show up, I would have had to dump ruby."

It's a tough sell in the mainstream Ruby (ie. Rails-centric) community. For example, at MtWest RubyConf two years ago, Chad Fowler told the assembled crowd that people working on Nitro (arguably the forerunner of Ramaze, and an influence on other Ruby Web tools) to stop. Flat out stop working on it. "We don't need it; it's just like Rails." Which, of course, was simply untrue. (My take was that Nitro was to Rails as Ruby is to Python. Similar, but with enough differences to matter. Ramaze follows in that way. Ramaze is opinionated software that says your opinion matters )

Fortunately, people kept on with developing new Web frameworks (both Rails-like and not), but none have had the same level of hype and business backing as Rails. Merb gets some decent attention, perhaps because it's (sort of) Rails-lite or Rails-done-better. (I'm not trying to disparage Merb, just offer an idea on why it gets more traction than, say, Ramaze.)

Seeing almost every 3rd-generation Ruby Web framework use Rack is encouraging, as is the continued lack of coupling to any particular ORM, and I expect to see even more loosely-coupled, easily assembled Web tools to come along.

Good times.
Ruby on Rails from Scratch Week 3
If I lived in the states I would certainly be trying to make my voice heard by my representative in congress. I really hope users are able to hold off the monopoly current radio broadcasters are trying to reestablish.
-1 shallow TC bashing

-1 feeds unhealthy TC obsession

-1 weak attempt at humor

-1 single joke stretched out too long

-1 ungrammatical headline

-1 awkward writing in article

In the News.YC of my dreams, everyone who upvoted this article would be disenfranchised.
The backing of Engine Yard is important.

There will be a Ramaze talk at the upcoming RubyConf in Orlando; hopefully it will attract more people to give it a whirl.
+1 -- why is this here?
The Google Hive Mind
i.e. nothing substantial in the past half-decade
This is really really awful for the future of the Internet. Generating random content is specifically the kind of garbage that we don't want on the web. It's the definition of 'free-ridership' -- lets create a bunch of valueless nonsense programmatically, and massively destroy true value (real useful information) and then PROFIT.

Weak.
UCLA group discovers 13-million-digit prime number
Nicely put :)
BYOC: Company gives workers unusual laptop leeway
Dealing with the problem of moon dust
The OP speculates that few people are capable of 'functioning without recourse', and that those who do so can make it at the executive level, and so seem more alive.

There's an alternative pathway. Perhaps, put in a position of responsibility, which most people in modern society seem to have managed to avoid, the situation draws liveliness and performance out of you? PG seems to have witnessed that transformation. I would guess that it's a greater effect than selection.

http://paulgraham.com/boss.html
There's the rental model, and there's the purchase model; DRM content is a variant of a rental.

There's the patent used as a troll or a torpedo, and there's the patent as a reward and a compensation for innovation.

There's the free content model, and then there's the important (to me) question of how I can continue to eat.

There's often no right answer here. And the simple answers can be surprisingly wrong.
Great video on Chuck here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rpk461T6l4
Why yes, yes it is.

Has anybody seen Dark City? There's a great example of one in there. Its where the guy loses his wallet.
I've found this discussion regarding Moore's law even more insightful:

http://tinyurl.com/4gke7c

in that it talks about the differing formulations of the law over the years.
The Lives and Death of Moore's Law
The best goals tend to align themselves with both self and public interest, as when the going gets hard and one or the other fades from view the other spurs you on.
A recollection: my wife and I were touring Alhambra (La Alhambra is what the spanish called it, but 'Al' is apparently the article in Arabic, so La Alhambra is a bit redundant) in Spain, and after walking around the whole thing were a bit tired. We walked out past some vending machines to the benches, and glanced at what was on offer: not only candy bars and fizzy drinks, but sandwiches, which we laughed at... who would eat a sandwich that had been sitting around under the Spanish sun all day; either it was chock full of potent chemicals, or it was already growing a disgusting range of nasties. Relaxing on the bench a few minutes later, we noticed a guy walk past, waving a few of the sandwiches, and exclaiming to his wife in a proud tone that he'd found something to eat. I guess the British deserve their reputation for not being picky eaters?
"Someone needs to teach Dan the difference between their and there before they let him hit publish again."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/stop-complaining-about-...
One big advantage is the runtime efficiency. Merb processes use less then half the ram of a rails process and can serve 2-5 times the traffic. This means you save a lot of money scaling your app for traffic demands.

Merb also does not lock you in to a specific way of doing things. It's very easy to bend the framework to your will.

Rails is great for the 80/20 rule. Rails will take you the first 80% faster then any other framework. But rails will make it super difficult to get that last 20% and will cost you double the hosting fees(over merb) or more when you have to scale.
Quote:
"“The issue of length is important to all these guys, and the way you know that’s the case is how often they tell you that length is not important,” said Mr. Kaplan, who sailed on the Maltese Falcon on its maiden voyage from Istanbul, where it was built, around the Greek Islands to the French Riviera."

In a lot of ways, this story should be right up my alley - I am a hacker, I'm very interested in starting my own company and finding someone to finance it, and I have spent many days sailing on my dad's sailboat. Sailing is a wonderful pastime - something I'm sure most hackers would love to do (you have to work within a set of strict parameters in a given system, but you can beat the system - temporarily - with the smallest adjustments to your equipment.) That's cool - and very hackerish (imho.)

But I'm sickened by this boat. As cool as it is - and the technology behind the sails is damn cool - it's just a disgusting waste of money. Do you really think that Perkin's gets his value out of this boat - or do you think it's just another exercise in Who-Has-The-Biggest-Dick?

We all want to have the biggest dick (excuse my language), but it's very important to recognize who you have to step on to get to that point. How many companies got shit term sheets because Perkins had to finance a boat that can never be fully enjoyed? (Larry Ellison wants to sell his megayacht because he can't even park it in normal harbors - he has to use industrial marinas to dock up.)

I think it's extremely appropriate that this boat is sailing into an American harbor for the first time as our financial system is going through one of the biggest moments of turmoil in decades. You can't make up that kind of stuff.

Personally, I hope it sinks.
While this seems more of an inflammatory post to garner attention, there's an important correction to be made.
Developing for the iPhone platform constitutes some degree of tacit support, it's true. But beyond that, it's important to make opposing views heard. I'm programming for it right now (taking a break to write this), and it's a fun platform, but it's not perfect. The sdk improves via developer feedback, including complaints.
Likewise, feedback across the different mediums on apple's App store are much more likely to bring about change than complete silence.

Let the complaints continue - likely we'll be the ones who benefit.
The point is that it's supposed to be a Squeak VM running directly on hardware. (So converting the VM to a CM -- Concrete Machine; yes, I did just coin that term). Running C code would mostly defeat the purpose.

Also, in a way it is an OS, but it's an OS that does nothing more than run what used to be a single userspace VM, so.. unless a VM is a userspace OS, it feels kind of funny to say that this is an OS...

Essentially, this is an OS-free VM, or a single VM OS. Both are correct.
You get -100 "awkward writing in article" was because the machine wrote it. Did you not read the post?
> You'd be out $25k.

Only if JP Morgan Chase goes under.
An intermediate stratum, above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO, is that of, say, partners at a non-big-name venture capital firm. The way their aura feels to me, is that they can hold up one end of an interesting conversation, but they don't sound very original, and they don't sparkle with extra life force.

Unadulterated pap. No, seriously..."strata"..."aura"..."feels"..."interesting conversation"..."life force". It's like Oprah trying to differentiate the class system within modern business.
This sort of thing wouldn't be competing with Linux. It would be far closer to competing with Nessus (the Blackberry OS) or FIRST Robotic's PIC "OS" or some other small embedded systems, instead of being a destktop OS.

to horribly abuse Feynman's phrase -- There's plenty of room at the bottom. The embedded market is huge. There's also a whole lot less need to stick with legacy systems; things are throw-away and you don't need to transfer apps between them as much. If you want to create a totally new system, start in embedded.
He miss a fundamental point: if I buy a fork there is no NDA about what kind of food I should eat with this. I think hardware able to run software need some kind of regulation that allows the user to run every kind of software he wants to run. Apple terms are violating this idea, that is not a law (unfortunately) but for many people is even more important since it's about freedom.
There's a Philip K. Dick story that involves a machine like this that is used to generate political speeches. Can't quite remember the title. Anyone know?
So the game of the week must be 'Which mainstream bloggers are using content generation tools?'

And the next big thing in startups is going to be filtering out algorithmically generated content.

Thus leading to a coevolutionary arms race where generators and filters are getting better and better until mere humans are outclassed. Automated comment bots and semantic maps of key demographic groups become dominant, generations of marketing lore gets coded into verbiage generators leading to an end state where the entire universe of online discourse is generated by Robert Scoble pushing a button, repeatedly.
Add OCaml to your shortlist.

What sort of applications are you trying to write? Which language has the people working in your field? That's what it boils down to really.
If I were a trillionaire, I would have some more interesting uses for that kind of money. Run my own projects, absolutely, but I'd hire great people to take care of the actual and experimental coding.

Futzing around with other people's APIs is one of the most frustrating parts of coding for me. Only reason I code myself is that I'm better at doing it than anyone I could hire. Only real advantage over outsourcing is the ay it pushes you to the edge of innovation because you can see the technological possibilities before other businesses do.
you are great
App Store Customer Reviews Now Require Purchase
too late. my app has been hit by a ton of people that say "I wont buy it till it does X".

I can't believe it took Apple this long to do this.
In this case, yes. JP Morgan was backing all the deposits at WaMu. But in general, don't count on this happening when a bank fails.
Californication Slip of the Tongue S02E01 Showtime
How long will it take Hank to mess things up with Karen? Not very long. Hank’s usual nice disposition doesn’t win him any favorites when he tries to talk his way out of a warning. He just gets arrested.
To add: above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO.... ...?
Ask YC: Anyone remember a site like this?
Hi All, sorry to do this but a while back I remember someone had posted a cool little tool (it may have been someone's baby) that would help build a url that was actually available.

For the life of me I can't seem to find this in my saved links, and Search YC doesn't seem to turn anything up either.

Anyone remember something like this? Thanks.
you're always in a box. being aware of the box can help you tremendously. it's when you think that you've left the box that's dangerous, because you're still in the box, but now you don't know it.
One thing remains: Hurd. You must ship the Hurd. Then, and only then, a true success will you be.
People should stop associating neural networks with backpropagation networks. That is like saying all of AI is based on simplistic rule-based systems. I guess it is mostly people with only casual knowledge of both fields who make suggestions of that sort.
Also, there is no reason to get outside the box. Most research and VC money tends to concentrate in one corner of the box. Go forth, be brave, and explore the box first!
I actually worked on this problem for Scribd. The solution isn't too heavyweight, especially if you're matching large blocks of unaltered text.
LG KE990 Viewty Silver Unlocked
LG KE990 Highlight and Namesake of this Phone is the 5 Megapixel camera. To get a camera with this much power you would have to lug around a Separate digital camera and that would be too much bulk. The Viewty frees you from this burden.
But competence is needed to be good at it.
I'm not sure I can agree with you. The man was not born wealthy, he achieved his wealth through hard work and persistence. He invested in small companies that may or may not have succeeded - he took risks and to his luck (and apt judgment), some of those risks paid off.

Does he get value out of his boat? From what I garnered from the article, it sure seems that way. And if you look at most successful individuals, you will find that many of them are highly competitive in all aspects of life. It's their nature, so you shouldn't hold it against them. My point is, even if it is the question of "Who-Has-The-Biggest-Dick", who are we to say that's immoral, unethical, or unjust?

And in regards to the "inappropriateness" of the boat sailing into the SF harbor, that's just plain ridiculous. Should everyone suddenly stop wearing expensive clothes, driving expensive cars, or buying expensive houses because the brokers on Wall St made a couple of stupid bets?
It's even better to recognize when your competition has sequestered themselves in a box; when your competition is being predictable.
They had a tour of the boat on 60 Minutes during a profile of Perkins. Really high tech, it's almost completely automated with custom software. Another interesting bit is the amount of carbon fiber, Perkins claims that besides the Airforce he is the largest purchaser of CF.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/01/60minutes/main3442...