skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went looking for a decent cross-browser calendar control a few months ago. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any that remotely fit my needs.

First, most of these are "date pickers" aka "date drop downs" instead of full blown calendars. Second, I need a lot of customization. For example, I want to be able to display a weekly calendar without dates. Or a monthly-style calendar which shows the current and next 3 weeks instead of named months. It needs to be skinnable to match my site as well as provide hooks for high level events like day-clicked. Ideally, I'd like both a server-side Python API for generating calendar HTML and a client Javascript API for manipulating an existing calendar. I know that's a tall order, but I couldn't find anything even close to that.

Rolling my own was difficult and time consuming. Luckily, I only needed prototype quality for now.
I think Clojure does this well; this solution pretty much requires that every collection is a full-fledged object, though, which is why I can't see it going into Arc. Maybe you could special-case lists and hash tables.
From a Strip of Scotch Tape, X-Rays
webhostingtalk is hosted at RS!
I agree. We should promote entrepreneurship by doing things like funding universal health coverage -- with the money we save from rolling back the corporate welfare state.

Giving more money to companies that are already successful doesn't encourage innovation; it encourages hoarding.
Unlimited Solar Power Discovery at MIT
Zepplin Sighting
And how is that even remotely related to this site/forum?

Stupid spam
I don't see why you are so dismissive of Unicode handling as it relates to programming language design. To deal with string encoding correctly, your programming language needs to transparently deal with different types of strings, or a single string that has two ways to iterate over it. That's an interesting design problem.

In particular, you do not want everything in Arc to be an object. But the typical way other programming languages deal with Unicode nicely is to have different classes that implement a common string interface. So how can Arc approach the string encoding problem without making everything an object? I don't know, but I do think it's an important question.
Linux makes possible a lower end of the PC market

Even there we see Microsoft's pitiful efforts get them a dominant position. Throw out a reduced version of XP that still adds 10% - 20% to the price tag (maybe more considering the hardware needs) & you take that market too.

I think we're really seeing a market crying out for competition.
I agree entirely - they are pushing themselves into a "change for change's sake" scenario.

The same applies to their other cash cow - Office. Office 2007 has some improvements I like... Powerpoint and Excel have some usability improvements... but on the whole.. Word for me is still Word as it was in Word 2000. There is nothing in 2007 that is that compelling. For many people it's probably Word 98, or Word 2.0.

Apple has avoided this by keeping OS X and the evolving it. This model seems to be working much better for now.
What kind of reports do you need?

ActiveMerchant just connects your app to a gateway for cc approval and processing.

Braintree has very nice reports on transactions and it's very easy to refund a payment.

Beyond that, you are dealing with Rails after all–it's pretty easy to scaffold out some reports from your subscriber base.
What Arc should learn from Ruby
Amen. Lisp history is like Chinese history. The 'warring states' period, though lamented as chaotic, was the most innovative time for both. Harmonious unity sounds good but yields stagnation. So three cheers for Arc and Clojure, and Estonia, the Czech Republic, the Liga Nord, the Bloc Québécois and the state of Jefferson.
here is the reference
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displays...

if links doesn't work the main pic:
http://media.economist.com/images/na/2008w39/Sacking.jpg

WTF with all the downvoting? First it was +5 now its 0. If you don't believe the post...google to find out if its true or not
is there some technical reason why you display domains that are already taken? Seems like they take up a lot of space which could be better used with extra suggestions
How to make your own spectrometer from a CD and a cereal box
Free Samples : Free Stuff : Freebies
New free samples and free stuff added daily. Only real freebies are listed.
For anyone interested, this infographic isn't a bad summary resource:
http://www.reason.com/images/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5a...

It summaries the various processes to become a citizen...
Great Source for Astrology
Most economists disagree with your assertions.
I still don't understand. He's tracking the S&P 500 which changes over time. Have any companies gone bankrupt from that before being delisted? If so, they'd be factored in already. If not, then someone with SPDRs (had they existed) wouldn't have cared.
Is it that hard to wait 10 seconds before moving? Take the time to tie your shoe or something before you run off.
I'd say only positively.

Regarding the article, this statement really freaked me out:

> So, we’ve got an idea - why can’t we place such a server in front of our application and make it cache content for all users in the world?

Seriously? They'd never even _heard_ of gateway / reverse proxy caching? They came up with it independently? I knew HTTP caching wasn't understood very well but this shows that it's so much worse than I imagined.

It's sad that such a fundamental aspect of the web's architecture is just completely off the radar for so many "web developers". That's not a knock on the Scribd folks, it's a systemic problem across our entire industry as far as I can tell.
Shuttleworth - GNOME usability hackfest
Indeed. Our processors and OSes have built-in, always-on caching but when it comes to Web servers it's considered advanced hacking.
These will all be made largely redundant in the coming years as HTML5 contains an input type for dates which will allow the browser to deal with the problem.
query_too_long
The interview process is definitely an intense one in this field. One thing to keep in mind when you're answering technical questions is that the interviewer is just as interested in hearing you think out the problem as they are in hearing the right answer. Thinking out loud is sometimes a good strategy if you run into a problem you can't answer on the spot.
I'm sorry, I was responding to the weights given our initial comments at the time of making my second one. It was frustrating for me to see a simple (though unsupported) opinion of mine given many downvotes because it expressed concern about the stances of Obama, while the following (also unsupported) comment had an equal number of upvotes for praising Him. That is how the mass-opinion moves.

It was unfair of me to attack the motives of Obama supporters. I do get frustrated living in real-world surroundings where there are 40 Obama bumper stickers for every 1 for somebody else, and an online world that is, if anything, more biased.

I would edit out the flippant remarks if I could, but alas, too much time has passed and HN doesn't let me. It is also my personal failing that I am unable to let a political discussion progress without getting involved. It is a further personal failing that I cannot do so while remaining dispassionate, although I have in the past. I may have just been worn down by Obamamania, it following me from the ground in pre-primary New Hampshire to university in San Diego unabated for nearly a solid year.

I also look forward to ten days from now when the excitement dies down, and our representatives in the great tug-of-war over the wealth of society that is democracy has been decided.
What a cool/smart guy. The key insight:

"Mr. Lee encourages innovators to ask themselves, “Would providing 80 percent of the capability at 1 percent of the cost be valuable to someone?” If the answer is yes, he says, pay attention. Trading relatively little performance for substantial cost savings can generate what Mr. Lee calls “surprising and often powerful results both scientifically and socially.”"

It's relatively common (and good) advice but it's super convincing in the context of the article...
Philip Greenspun: Race prejudice versus age prejudice in the election
For proof of that btw:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/16/dilbert.economy/index...

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm...

"Even among Republican [economist]s Mr Obama has the edge: 46% versus 23% say Mr Obama has the better grasp of the subject
It is possible to write very dense and abstract functional code that is hard to understand but some Lisp-code is so readable you wonder if it is actually code!

That said I don't see Lisp becoming big. Scala probably has a better chance.

Scalalooks great on paper and is better than JAVA in my opinion. However in practice it still feels very heavy and kind of JAVA-ish. Not for me but perhaps a natural step for a lot of JAVA-developers.
Aspirations, perhaps? When I'm a grandfather, I wouldn't mind knowing I can land a 30-ish model due to vast wealth. Hell, I'm currently 30-ish, and can't land a model. Just need to work on the vast wealth, I reckon.

But, seriously, I agree. Not interesting, and not really on topic.
I think Loic (seesmic founder) had a post on a similar topic, a while back -- ie, when he moved from france to the bay area to start seesmic.
Why? I don't even bother to read the times and more if it's not pointed to on friendfeed or here. It's a better filter.
Anyone played much with compjure? I loved the ideas in it - last I tried however I wasn't able to make changes and refresh - I had to restart the app to see changes. Interestingly (and nicely) it "compiled" the changes up front, telling me of any errors. That part was nice but having a F5 refresh/change cycle for web apps I think is expected now.
The city is a monument to plunder. I walk or drive around and wonder at the wealth you see, which is all stolen from all over the country.
Many things are faster...but Squid does an awful lot more.

C is faster than Ruby, but you're not suggesting building their apps in C. Why not? Because capabilities matter, too.
Also bankruptcies count into your average return of x% if you're tracking the market as a whole. 3 companies will go bankrupt (-100%) but 1 that grossly outperforms the market (+1000% in a few years, for example) more than covers it.

It's an average, that's what averages do.
It's not interesting, it's just wrong. Even if the total market averages 10%, that's counting bankruptcies. It's not a median or a mode, it's a mean.
I know its a cliche, and not really a "programming language" but XML has caught on with the masses (yes, its still popular, although I would wager most here would hate to edit it by hand).

Who knows what the future holds. Good luck indeed !
Question.

As a non American, I wonder what brings US to a (relatively) extreme position on Health. Technicalities aside, most places consider health as part of the suite of public responsibilities.

Does a significant portion of the opposition to the public assuming responsibility for health also oppose the public assuming responsibility for education? I ask because it seems a close parallel.
I agree totally about starting up something in a down economy. It's a great time to test the waters, position yourself for growth and then scale like crazy when the economy thaws. No good surfer ever catches a wave while it's breaking...by that time, it's too late and your eating coral reef. Good surfer bob up and down watching the horizon for the good wave... the big one. They see it before it ever starts to break and they're paddling at just the right time to nail it. Such is the start up entrepreneur in the bad economy. My company, InnoGage, will be able to weather this storm in the higher ed market, but we will be positioned for the global economy when it thaws.

Tom Williams
http://blog.innogage.com
It is my unsupported opinion that economists have Bush fatigue just like everybody else, and are eager to see the regime of permanent deficits and trillion dollar wars out on the streets. Obama does appear at times to be thoughtful, and his advisors are centrists. I think economists are hoping for a second Clinton, which would certainly be better than a third Bush. I hope they are right.

It is my unsupported opinion given my anecdotal interactions with people that the following quote is the explaining factor of The Economist piece:

'Either way, according to the economists, it would be difficult to do much worse than George Bush. The respondents give Mr Bush a dismal average of 1.7 on our five-point scale for his economic management. Eighty-two per cent thought Mr Bush’s record was bad or very bad; only 1% thought it was very good.

The Democrats were overwhelmingly negative, but nearly every respondent viewed Mr Bush’s record unfavourably. Half of Republican respondents thought Mr Bush deserves only a 2. “The minimum rating of one severely overestimates the quality of Bush’s economic policies,” says one non-aligned economist.'

On that, I whole-heartedly agree with them.
This is silly. McCain is 72 years old, 7 years past normal retirement. Not voting for him because of age is not prejudice it is sound judgement. This is a hard job.
1.Incorporate the company in US.
2.Incorporate another company in India.
3.Outsource work from US company to Indian company.
4.Indian company hires contractor (you) in the US.

Is something like that possible? I'm just guessing really.
It depends on what you mean by first-rate. I mean, developing the sorts of things the parent mentioned requires a lot more talent than writing an app. But, to be fair, that requires an incredible amount of skill. Most people, including bright and capable people who work hard to learn, won't ever do something like that. But I agree that the people at Facebook, if not all revolutionary and brilliant, are all pretty damn good at what they do. Beyond scalability, too: Facebook has got more small little quirks that go towards usability than any other site that I know. Then they make a redesign that renders all those small quirks pointless because the new layout is vastly easier. Then they introduce more quirks.

The first time that I wrote a long message and saw the message window expand, I jumped with excitement. It was pretty awesome to find a new feature one day that I didn't expect and never would have thought to ask for.
I'd like to erase all memory of the movie Johnny Mnemonic... and maybe Paycheck too.
What happened to procrastination and laziness?

To say nothing of impatience and hubris.
Indeed- I guess Alfred Nobel and dynamite is the classic example of this.
I've been doing this for a couple of years now. with 4GB of ram sometimes it will take a minute to dump everything.. so i was very eager to get rid of that delay
Invent Now - Promoting Inventing to Kids
This post is almost entirely dead WRONG. It's revenue that matters, period. "People" are not what matters. Satisfied customers matter. If you provide a product or service that people are willing to pay for, then nothing ... NOTHING can take that from you. You don't NEED investors. Get off that trip. This article mentioned that, "the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that they were the first investors in Google." Sorry, but again WRONG. The reason they are so rich compared to the rest of us is that we've lost track of the concept that we live in a Shared Fate world. We're all in this together, but we've forgotten that fact. It is physically and philosophically IMPOSSIBLE for any individual human being to be worth BILLIONS more than any other human being. We all put our pants on one leg at a time and we all only have 24 hours in a day. "All men are created equal." Remember that? It's called the Declaration of Independence. I believe your writing eminates from the right motives, but it fosters many of the wrong reactions and sentiments. Find a customer. Provide what the customer requires. No customer, no business. End of story. Yes, this post is intentionally terse and dialectical in order to to elicit meaningful dialog instead of pointless ass kissing.
I'm not sure a lot is gained from this comparison (caveat: I've used neither language in anger).

PG states that Arc is intended as a 100-year language, so getting your core axioms and constructs right is pretty key. This kind of approach has a higher activation energy, but momentum can continually build.

The philosophy for Ruby is getting things done now, although arguably it gained a lot from it's time in the Japanese niche. It's a fantastically productive language and favoured by a lot of productive "lets get it done" people (not to say Arc isn't...). This philosophy accelerates quickly, but tends to eventually hit conceptual limits. In my view this happened with Java - but this doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

I'm struggling with some of the same problems (in microcosm, maybe nanocosm in comparison). For example, if you build an exception mechanism - do you make it an ultimately flexible signal system, or do you constrain it to certain norms?

The latter favours rapid growth as all your libraries have consistent exception mechanisms. I can build a library and integrate it easily with another library. The same applies for a whole bunch of other constructs, such as network models, concurrency, etc, etc. So what you have done is constrain X to allow growth in Y... (A lot of what a language is about is what it doesn't let you do, rather than what it allows).

The former may result in some nasty mutations in the short-term - For example, libraries that aren't interoperable because they have different exception mechanisms. However, if you are taking a long term evolutionary view then this approach may yield a much more innovative, stable mechanism in the long term.

So really, they are just two different philosophies with different start and end points - that's how I read pg's quotes also.
US Army warns of Twitter dangers
Note also, that on the list "100 Economists for McCain" there are actually only 90 names...
Actually I didn't want to freak you out :-)

Of course we've heard (and even used) caching reverse proxies - I've just explained the flow of our thoughts and words in the chat room during the brainstorming. I mean one thing is when you know about something and completely different when all pieces of a puzzle get together and you see a full picture.
Why would nginx be a bottleneck? and What kind of bottleneck do you mean?
I agree that felt-value constitutes reality in business, on both sides, the value of having a vendor and the value of having a client, both orbiting a meaningful transaction.

However I balk at the Declaration of Independence as the basis for this. It is part of cosmic law that seemingly disparate parts be unified as events in time and space.

The time prior to now was more available to this awareness, but incompletely conscious of this underlying basis for justice, commerce, etc. We have no pants, basically.

The internet has exposed this issue we have of whether to actually work for the true common good, for the Universal interest and no a niche freedom like americanic liberty or romantic imperial entitlement, or whether we are doing the fun thing - being king, being the man, being the world authority, but not the real, messy, selfless, egoless world leader. The leader serves the universal interest. The merely free do not have this underlying responsibility to the people. Whether in america, rome, babylon, sumaria, russia, the little people and the heavy heavies must be on the same platform, or there is no genuine premise of law.

So that is the dynamic under the problem internet companies have. Solving the underlying dynamic will be required to solve the problem on top - revenue. Once this dynamic of congruence with the universe fruits, as it is today, there will no longer be quixotism in human interactions.I agree that felt-value constitutes reality in business, on both sides, the value of having a vendor and the value of having a client, both orbiting a meaningful transaction.

However I balk at the Declaration of Independence as the basis for this. It is part of cosmic law that seemingly disparate parts be unified as events in time and space.

The time prior to now was more available to this awareness, but incompletely conscious of this underlying basis for justice, commerce, etc. We have no pants, basically.

The internet has exposed this issue we have of whether to actually work for the true common good, for the Universal interest and no a niche freedom like americanic liberty or romantic imperial entitlement, or whether we are doing the fun thing - being king, being the man, being the world authority, but not the real, messy, selfless, egoless world leader. The leader serves the universal interest. The merely free do not have this underlying responsibility to the people. Whether in america, rome, babylon, sumaria, russia, the little people and the heavy heavies must be on the same platform, or there is no genuine premise of law.

So that is the dynamic under the problem internet companies have. Solving the underlying dynamic will be required to solve the problem on top - revenue. Once this dynamic of congruence with the universe fruits, as it is today, there will no longer be quixotism in human interactions.
it used to be hosted on metacolo, which seems to also be gone. but i found another copy here:

http://www.securitytechnet.com/resource/rsc-center/presentation/Defcon/11-2003/dc11-havenco.pdf
"All programs are compilers for data."
The Toilet: Our Greatest Health Breakthrough Ever?
Ask HN: Awesome talks/video available online?
I know that the TED talks are up free, I'm familiar with MIT's OpenCourseWare, the free educational material up on iTunes, and that Google puts some tech talks online. Unfortunately, it looks like you have to be a member to see Long Now Foundation video. But I figure I must be missing something. Any suggestions?
Try railskit or servicemerchant.org
Yes, I think that is a good point.
9Keme wrote, "The merely free do not have this underlying responsibility to the people."

Beautiful. Declaration of INTERdependence time?
Love TED. Another great one was the New Yorker conference:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/conference/conference20...

Also, if you want you can see all the ones I've bookmarked on my delicious account:

http://delicious.com/sidsavara/video

Some may be off topic, but in general I think it's as good a place to find videos as anything else. I tend to bookmark 1-3 a week, if it is tagged +someday or +todo then all bets are off on quality, as it means I saw it referenced somewhere or tweeted and bookmarked it for future reference.
"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences"

Vegetarians?

Vegetarians?! Seriously?
Here's some specific suggestions. I was most recently fascinated by this video on head tracking "virtual reality".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

Another cool thing if you're into DIY robots (not really educational, but I found it inspiring) is the Yellow Drum Machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RyodnisVvU

Not sure why I got on the robot tangent but here's another good one, a 4-legged robot that's pretty good at navigating hills and obstacles. Especially the recovery from a fall sequence around 1:25.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

And here is hacking the Wii Fit controller and a Roomba to do a sort of vacuum-by-surfing... thing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLbprdjTX0w&feature=relat...