skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair there are a lot more platforms than just PC OSes. (Some flavor of) OpenGL is standard on many embedded systems and video game consoles.
'Billions of Entrepreneurs' from India and China Should Know Each Other?
Scheme implementations on the JVM have the added benefit that it's easy to find CS grads with Scheme on the resume. Not that it takes much time to pick up, but having it on resumes fits mainstream hiring practices better.
Mark Cuban's advice to newspapers: "Bankruptcy is probably your best friend"
Your right. I'll stop posting comments complaining and go somewhere else. By the way, again, please try and get the point of what people say instead of trying discredit them. If you don't think i'm enough a part of the community to dawn upon you a valid observation then so be it. As if you can't spot a problem only through observation. I won't be posting here any longer. Good job building the community robg.
But how could, lets say, demanding TDD ever cost you talented programmers? It won't, ever.

This is wrong. TDD may or may not be useful. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, but in my experience it has been used in a "cargo cult" approach to programming. The last startup I spent significant time at was eventually destroyed because they hired an "Agile/VP" of engineering. He then hired a bunch of guys who could do "TDD" but didn't actually know how to write software.
I was hoping for something about questionable legality, not just areas that don't already exist.
The Poetic Run Around of Apple's App Store
It's decentralized, but tightly coupled. If US News & World Report drops the SAT category for ranking colleges, you will see schools stop using the SAT overnight.
what's with the violent rejection of this article?

Where's the article? I see no article.

Does it deal with 'hacker culture'?

On the basis that there is not "it", then the answer would have to be no. "It" doesn't deal with hacker culture because "it" exists not.

Should it be discussed?

See point above.

I would concur with ScottW on the basis that this is neither an article nor a point worth discussing, just a misleading headline with a link to an admittedly cool piece of technology.

Let's keep the brain-dead misleading "Hey, check out this cool link lolz" dumb-ass headlines to other sites, please. I check reddit regularly and have no need of that trash here.
Its been shown you can actually score well on the SATs, at least a while ago when it was on paper and multiple choice, without actually having to read the questions. To me thats a failure of a test.

Maybe they've fixed this bug, but here's an example. If you have a math problem like, (substituting x for actual words)

x x 5 x 5 x x x

And your choices are
a) 5
b) 10
c) 15
d) 25

If this question is at the beginning of the test, its most likely the easiest solution, so pick 10. This is because the first questions are moved to the front because they are most easily solved by the worst test takers. These people, no matter how twisted their reasoning, most likely will come up with 10 by adding the two numbers they see, or just pick 5 because they just saw a 5

Towards the middle of the test you'd go with 25, because these are less likely, and necessarily wont be guessed by the dummies, but the people having reached this point will do something fancier like multiply the numbers together,

At the end of the test, where its hardest to reach, the answer would be 15 because you are least likely to come up with that answer.

This is the key to the whole hack- the answer to a difficult question cannot be accidentally guessed, otherwise, it would end up in the first questions, or just be thrown out. You see, they couldn't determine the level of difficulty of a question by reading it, they did statistically by who got it right, and how well that person did on the overall test, so if you had a question that was answered correctly by most takers who also got most of the other questions correct, and got wrong by those who didn't do well on the rest of the test, that was a "hard" question.

When this was uncovered the testing company freaked out and the move to computers couldn't come fast enough for them (they administer these tests on computers yet?) Its because the test can dynamically be calibrated for the test taker and you can't use the first questions, middle questions, last questions rule.
There are A LOT of really smart people there. They're outnumbered by the idiots, but they're there. More importantly though, a well thought out answer with explanations and references can be very convincing to even the biggest idiot.
Are you happy with your ISP? | TechJaws
i cannot believe this guy starts off his post touting DC

let me give you the executive summary of the DC area:

1. EVERYONE WORKS FOR THE GOVERNMENT, and they completely don't get why you wouldn't want to also

2. PEOPLE IN VIRGINIA ACTUALLY VOTED FOR GEORGE BUSH, and they are totally into nascar

3. THE WEATHER SUCKS, unless you like 90% humidity
question: doesn't submitting posts like this, which will likely garner a bunch of points, contradict the theme that it is pushing forth? seeing a bunch of top threads that just talk about the state of HN makes HN much less HN-like.
Instead of going elsewhere, why not simply submit content that you think is better?

As for my complaints on your comments, it's very strange for me to read complaints from someone who has done nothing (quite literally) to fix the problem they're complaining about. You have that power just as much as I do. Why not make use of it?
it is extra-ordinarily inexpensive to start a startup in India - what it requires is seed funding - most of the time VCs don't fit the bill - funding from firms like Y-Combinator / Union Square venture will be more viable and profitable.

Right now copycats are more visible but with some effort and due diligence indian startups will take a center-stage in next five years.... with couple of hundred thousand dollars you can build world class teams working on multiple products, services and technologies. Its a red-hot market for angels and seed-funding cos.
Agree, there's already another "content gripe" thread at the top. At least this one is saying something positive, though. =)
C# is a Java-like language that uses the .NET runtime. Unlike Java, it has first-class functions.

A dog is a four-legged animal that goes woof.

A cow is like a dog, but it's larger, and goes moooooo.
Congratulations!! When is your next Ironman? (I have many friends who do Ironman triathlons and it is scary how fit they are and how important training is part of their lifestyle).

For those who don't know about Ironman training, the volume of Ironman training (15hr/week) etc. - the whole purpose of those hundreds of hours of training is so that the athlete does not go anaerobic during the race (lactic acid). Once you go anaerobic, your chances of completing the race diminish greatly.
Can you point me to somewhere where I can download a single click install lisp stack that includes a webserver? Preferably for windows, which is what I use at work.

Can you point me to a site where all lisp functions are well documented with user comments?

Can you point me to a place where I can find a bunch of lisp libraries that are maintained and in use that I can use for my projects?

No?
Why is typing something like maximusklein.gmail.com and logging in with google more complicated than maximusklein@gmail.com.

People keep saying over and over again that open ID is too hard for average users, but I just don't see any evidence that this is the case.
Some people that score well on interview tests are the worst fuckuppited programmers you'd never want to work with. And some who blow it are a pleasure to work with.

Those little tests don't account for documentation, architecture, scalability, readability, refactoring, etc. I don't give a damn if somebody can't come up with some little algorithm during the pressure of a test that could have easily just googled for, and also what is the best practices for that algorithm.

You are probably somebody new to the industry.
Writing dynamic XML sitemaps using PHP
We only have like 2 months to go before all this talk about politics is over..the problem might solve itself
Yes. I'm in the same boat. I have a Dell widescreen 20".
Especially with Web startups, following Tip 1 (Take Your Time) might mean you're still on the ground floor when a more ambitious someone has secured investment and begun executing despite poor economic conditions. She basically admits this herself in Tip 4 (Wear the Watch).
OK, thanks for pointing that out.
Hacker Makes $250k on iPhone Apps
Yeah, you're absolutely right. In this case, I just wish that folks would make the community better, by submitting and upvoting better content, than by complaining. The former is the only way to change things. Every time we wish to complain, and I have too on occasion, I just wish we'd remember the submit and upvote principle.
BOLLYWOOD to emerge as India's 'soft power' of the future, says Bank chief economist
I'm sorry, but that doesn't actually make any sense at all. Why would forcing a bank to focus on either investment banking or commercial banking, but not both, avoid runs on the bank? Bear Stearns was an investment bank; it faced a run on the bank. Indymac was a commercial bank; it faced a run on the bank. So far, it looks like the banks that were exclusively one or the other have faced runs, but I don't know of any bank active in direct lending and capital markets (and merger advisory and such) that faced a run on the bank.

Frauds and undisclosed conflict of interest still occur, but that is a matter for the SEC, which oversees investments.

This tends to reinforce my "It was already illegal, so making it illegal again is at best a duplication of effort, and at worst a way to further restrict those of us who aren't criminals," point.
The multicore crises: Scala vs. Erlang
What's interesting about this is that most of the "inappropriate" things shown on Facebook/MySpace/etc. are things that most people have done. Yes, we see those red solo cups of beer as a sign that someone is less mature, but let's face it, most of us have at one point before we were 21 had a red solo cup with alcohol in it - the difference is that there was no way to store/link it in a convenient way before recently.

Most people sweep these things under the rug. Once they hit 30, underage drinking becomes a scourge in a way that it certainly wasn't when they were doing it. Partying becomes the image of the lazy/unambitious rather than someone having a life. Just look at Obama and Palin: both admit to smoking pot and both believe that pot-smokers today should be punished harshly for something they have done.

I think that as these things start following us around more, we're going to have to reevaluate what we deem as "deviant" behavior since it's going to become painfully obvious that this deviant behavior might actually be the norm.

OR maybe people will get better at de-tagging themselves from photos.
Proto.Menu: A prototype-based context menu
FBI Searches Apartment of Tennessee Student Suspected of Palin Hack
You could do great things with macro-photography here.
That's a lot of hows. I'm holding out for the whys ;)

That said, it seemed like an interesting blog, and I have the feed added to my feed-reader now.
You're failing to see the positive feedback cycle at work here.

1) Political articles creep in

2) Political articles draw more of the politics crowd

3) Voting power of hacker crowd decreases as a percentage of total votes

4) Submit power of hacker crowd decreases as a percentage of total submits

5) This leads to a slow but steady increase in political articles

6) Go back to 1)

This is not a self-correcting system. It can and will happily veer into irrelevance because there are far more politics/reddit type users out there on the internet than there are hackers on HackerNews.

Hence why we need to apply conscious control to it, not just "submit and vote more".

It is madness to expect the same action in the same circumstances to bring anything other than the same result.
IBM has had a tool for building off-line web applications for many years.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/dols.ht...
It works OK, but never really caught on even among customers who already have Lotus Domino. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem. So I'm not surprised that Google Gears uptake has been slow.
Is your Rails application safe?
Thanks.

Next season I'll
1. do the half-Ironman, goal is to improve my PB of 5:30 to 5:00ish and
2. run a marathon, anything lower than 3:30 would kick ass. (I've never ran "just" a marathon.)

I plan to return to the Ironman in 2 years and improve my time to sub-12:00. That should be pretty simple since I would've finished 12:30ish this year were it not for the fact that all season I ran on a rubber track and my feet couldn't take the asphalt at the race (last 10km went out the window).
I almost was inspired to, but it said something like comments require 50 points.

I also don't know what I'd write. As a programmer, I feel crippled without first-class functions, but I'm not sure I know how to distill them into a few choice lines. My first instinct was to use something like map, but I don't think JS has such functions built-in.
How A VC Can Change The Cap Table
I find economics fascinating. The unfortunate fact is, though, that most economic discussions very rapidly degrade into libertarians vs non libertarians or capitalists vs socialists, or something along those lines. Another popular one is Austrian economics vs Mainstream economics.
Because I know clearly what one is, but I am unsure what the other one is. To me, the URL is a webpage. And it's not clear to me how a webpage is going to log me into another webpage if I am a user.

Users don't see URLs as URLs, they see them as pages, like on a newspaper. So OpenID is based on a concept that alien to users.
4. Not to mention the all-caps writers..
It's hard to find good stuff, and sometimes there just isn't that much. This of course leads to a 'crowding out' problem if there's lots of junk being posted - you just can't compete without spending more time searching for content than the junk submitters.
Sure, commonly when you have a big project, it seems like it is just a few remaining details.

That doesn't mean- as you seem to suggest- that small little problems don't exist!
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(publishing)

Article (publishing): An article is a stand-alone section of a larger written work. These nonfictional prose compositions appear in magazines, newspapers, academic journals, the internet, or any other type of publication.

Semantically speaking it may not be an article digested by some 'dude' at a 'desk' at a 'newspaper'. Nonetheless, it does reveal useful insight, particularly how Obama perceives the global economy and how to get ourselves aligned with it so that we stay #1 in the years to come (which means us hackers have jobs).

Regardless of that, you are right, the headline is misleading, so help the community, here's some advice on writing headlines:
http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-headlines-that-work/
BOOK REVIEW: "Jack"
Paper: On Delivering Embarrassingly Distributed Cloud Services
It's been about a year or two since I've done anything serious in python, and ... yikes. Does anyone else get the feeling that Python is "C++ing" itself into a confusing mess? While lots of these elements weren't surprising to me, some were. And many that were convey little to no real value (c.f. "decorators", or "the step argument in slice operators").

This is the same thing that happened to C++. If you keep adding features that are useful to someone in some specific context, what you get is a more powerful language for an expert user writing code, but one that is much less productive for the people who have to maintain it.

And, can I just ask: how many ways to iterate over stuff does python really need?
Clay Shirky: It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
Anthropology: The Business Model
T-Mobile's Dream Is a Distraction
What is TTD? Or do you mean TDD (Test Driven Development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Driven_Development)?
But that's not because of TDD, it because of people who couldn't write software.

Imagine if those people were also bad at math, would you say math is only occasionally useful?

Obviously I agree about "cargo cult" programming, the worst of it is when someone has a religious affinity for pair programming, but thinks testing is a waste of time.
Posterous - Dead Simple Way to Blog and Share Files with Freinds
Is ShareThis the next Digg?
Lessons for Google’s Android Marketplace from Apple App Store
Now if there was only test driven spelling, I wouldn't keep embarrassing myself on the inter tubes.
Agreed. As it stands, all it takes for Hacker News to become Reddit is for the hackers to be outvoted by the Reddit crowd. The wildcard factor is PG, who will probably step in more aggressively if and when he thinks quality has slipped too far.

Remember that "hacker" can mean a variety of things. For YCombinator, a "hacker" is a smart person who likes to build great things, usually using the medium of software. For other communities, "hacker" might mean script kiddie, or World of Warcraft gamer, or tech fanboy. So even the current standard - on-topic = interesting to hackers - won't necessarily protect HN.
Obama Significantly Revises Technology Positions
We need a co-founder for this YC round
I won't describe the idea, but obviously we think it's not bad. We're looking for somebody to help us build a demo, and join the team if we get through (and perhaps even if we don't). Writing in Rails, and happy to talk to someone with a different background, but wanting to get into it (or convince us to switch!)

Please email me at markk (at) cantab (dot) net, if you'd like to hear more, or make a suggestion. I'm in London at the moment.
What evidence is there for this feedback loop? The one in a hundred political articles? To me, their relative lack, in the current climate, is proof of the opposite conclusion: The strength of this community. Your loop falls apart at #2 because the posts at #1 seldom make it to the front page.

Still, the point remains, the solution isn't fleeing to somewhere else (where the problem will likely repeat). It's sticking around and submitting posts to make the community stronger (by your standards).

Technologically, I think the solution is weighting votes by karma. That would give the initial users more say AND make it harder for new users to push the community around. But that's not our decision here.
Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd
There's a lot of people that would agree with out. And a lot of people that point this out whenever someone complains.

But could you (or anyone) explain how submit and upvote keeps this community from growing and become ever more generic?

In my mind popular = generic, and I'm not sure how Submit & Upvote helps?
"answers" don't require 50 points. In fact I don't think answers even require login.
Swoogle: Semantic Web Search Engine
For any low-lever hardware engineers, I can highly recommend using Python. The struct module is by far the easiest way to send and interpret exact bits along a wire.
LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds
What evidence is there for this feedback loop?

It is self evident.
Not that I disagree with your point, but as a PHP developer myself:

1 - PHP does not require Apache. There is a command-line PHP interpreter: `apt-get install php5-cli` allows you to do `php <filename>` and such just fine.

2 - PHP has a lot more libraries available than just what you find in your Apt repositories, such as PEAR, which is PHP's equivalent of CPAN.

3 - Just about every editor I know of has excellent syntax highlighting for PHP; some even go so far as to contextually highlight HTML/CSS/SQL code as it appears in the middle of your PHP code.

4 - As for a REPL, check out [phpsh](http://www.phpsh.org).

5 - Your point of not using $i for an iterator is absurd, although your point of scoping is not. Using $i for iterators is perfectly fine and sane, assuming the obvious act of not using iterator variables outside hte scope of what they're iterating, which IMO should be standard proctice anyways just for the purpose of clarity...
It's really neat, but your domain name really needs to be thought through....
I'd say the guidelines and then the community that breathed life into them. That's the hypothesis any ways. They seem to be the only thing restricting the content.

I think some additional algorithms could work, and we're building an application based on them. But so far, here, I'm not sure they're necessary.
I found the whole "you can't do this, or that, or this other thing without points" kind of annoying.
This post from eastcoastblogging looks like a summary of this great article from jason calacanis on pr: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/8/jason-calacanis-on-how-to...
He has said he monitors for drift. That he hasn't "stepped in", speaks volumes to me that it isn't necessary - yet.
Really? If it were, I'd think you could point to some actual evidence instead of relying on self-evidence.
What would be a true Black Swan in your opinion?
"and there are trends that suggests that will have thousands of cores before we know it. But each core will be very slow compared to todays cores."

Yeah I don't buy that personally.
Decorators are greatly valuable.

For example, in a framework like Django they are used for permissions in views. So you can quickly just make sure a user is logged in or is an admin to see a specific view, all with an un-obtrusive @login_required.

I don't find any of these features bad - they are easy to read and useful.
8 tips for "scaling" CSS development
Techniques for scaling CSS development to multiple developers just like you would any major component of your code-base.
I'll never understand the mindset behind windows developers that says: "When starting a project to do some simple low-level task, first throw up a uselessly simple GUI application and put a button on it." I mean, half of this article is about how to use the GUI wizard, just to show off about 10 lines of code.

Beyond that, it's reasonably instructive. I'm happy to know that RS-232 isn't forgotten in the .NET world; there is lots of legacy hardware out with important things to say.

Although I was amused by this bit of hubris in the API design:

serialPort1.StopBits= StopBits.One;

I'd be curious to hear why the designer felt that the concept of a "stop bit" was so important or complicated that it deserved its own abstraction for the number one. :)
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I think I am a good programmer, and I think TDD is aweful. Using unit testing, has its place, especially when working with parts that have clear input/output ranges, or in large systems, where your piece of code has to be integrated somewhere else, so you want to make sure it works before committing it.

BUT, programming according to Tests, is not a good idea. Tests are not the END RESULT, not the ultimate user of your code!!! Instead of tests being for what they are: testing your input/output, they are being used to design systems. So, you are designing your programs according to tests, and not their ultimate functionality.

Here is another thing that I think: Weaker programmers prefer TDD. It is like they want validation b/c they are unsure of what they are writing.