skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having programmed a lot in Common Lisp in the past these comparisons between Ruby and Lisp kind of puzzle me. The things that make Lisp Lispy (i.e. homoiconicity, hygienic macros, quoting ) aren't part of Ruby. From my standpoint Ruby looks like most dynamic language these days in that strongly encourages highly stateful programming with a sprinkling of metaprogramming.

Perhaps someone else has a different view?
Plv8js: V8 Engine Javascript Procedural Language add-on for PostgreSQL
We're doing this right now at http://www.iubenda.com
and Privacy Policies are our starting point. Anyway, I can assure you that's far from being simple :)
Here you can see a sneak peek of the upcoming new version: http://www.iubenda.com/blog/2011/10/12/a-brand-new-version-s... :)
>It says, "stop encouraging women to do startups!"

The title is "stop telling women to do startups". I think the distinction is critical. (Perhaps this is her own strawman, but I think its important to get correct where she's coming from). Telling someone what to do is saying you know better than them, that somehow they're choice is sub-par and they need to be corrected. That's what she is ranting against. The implied assertion that women who choose to downshift their career must be doing so because of hidden sexism, not because they simply choose to.
My eyes rolled so hard at this, it woke up my wife in the next room. Then we both had a laugh at me being described as 'enlightened' - in my neck of the woods, most people think I'm a troglodyte.

Look, sometimes people do real, obvious, correctable things that result in inequality. There's nothing 'alleged' about these things, and correcting them isn't an 'unendable initiative' - usually, all you've got to do is be a little more self-aware.

A case in point - a startup I co-founded a few years back was all-male for a while, and without getting into the details, we didn't always maintain a sophisticated level of conversation around the office. We didn't change our habits after we hired a couple of female college students part-time.

Later, I found out our part-time employees were uncomfortable with our office banter. Not cool, since this was their first exposure to startups and the type of people that work for them. When I found out about this, my unendable initiative to fix the problem was a quick email, which took care of it. (Still irritated that I didn't pick up on this earlier.)

That's it - no systematic bias in the other direction, no big bureaucratic programs by government authorities, just being aware enough of your surroundings to not be an asshole. You can do it too.
You _can_ just walk into the library at the University of Wisconsin. There is only one library on the Madison campus (Memorial Library) that requires an ID to enter. That leaves 49 other libraries on campus open to anyone.
Thank you scottilee. I have used evernote and it did not suit my purpose much. Springpad looks cool! Will check it out.
I'm right there with you. Unfortunately it's really hard to use a physical analogy to describe it so I'll make an argument without one.

People are taking this issue which exists in a gray area and trying to frame it as black and white. These kids who put the disclaimers up grew up in a time when Napster and MP3 sharing was huge and since they didn't understand the issues then (or thought they did) they aren't trying to now nor do they have any interest in trying. Copyright is just fine. What's wrong with demanding to be paid for your creation? Why should people think they're entitled to not pay for use of your work because they believe copyright is wrong?

What if I believed tht murder was okay, went around murdering people in broad daylight then threw a fit about how "well, the laws against this are outdated and lame so you shouldn't punish me because the law sucks"?

The arguments about people not paying anyway and free marketing are both lame and they're excuses to make pirates and copyright infringers feel better. People who can't afford to buy a creation will eventually try to save up to get it. If they still can't afford it then why should they get it free anyway? I can't afford a new BMW even if I save for it, so should I be able to walk into the dealership and just take one and drive off screaming "well, I wouldn't have bought it anyway so it's not really anyone's loss!" And the only free marketing you get from this sort of thing is links to the free pirated version! No one markets the paid, original work and those who see the pirate version are more likely to have been looking to steal other digital media so it's not like they saw a recommendation for it on Amazon, they saw a link to a free copy and it's doubtful they'll search out a paid copy.

The thing about this issue is that many times you have to judge on a case by case basis. Remember the "remembering Steve" variation on the Apple logo? It very clearly used someone else's intellectual property but I think even Apple could agree that there was nothing to get upset over. This Pulp Fiction remix is kind of a gray area. The entire movie is online but just not in order. Is it different enough from the original to consider it not harmful to Tarentino ans the studio? I guess my point is that copyright isn't all bad, no one is entitled to free work as many believe these days, the reasons given for pirated material not being harmful are just excuses, and we really have to judge on a case by case basis.

I know it's not popular to defend copyright but I am anyway because there are parts of the issue that are right on. I'm with corin here and I don't get why he was downvoted like that. That little down arrow isn't there to silence unpopular opinions, it's for getting rid of trolls and off topic posts.
The lack of destructors and constructors makes Objective C miss an entire galaxy of functionality. That the language authors and programmers don't sorely miss this feature is a testimony to the limited understanding they have of programming. Lack of destruct-when-I-leave-scope makes real exception semantics impossible, and no "smart" objects that clean up after themselves meaning it's impossible to create abstract data types with such limited features. Programmers who don't miss these features I call "flat programmers" because they are missing an entire dimension in their code. They are forever having to understand the details of their implementations instead of being able to package up functionality from initialization to destruction in abstract terms. Don't bother trying to explain any of this to them. People don't understand what they don't understand. They don't even know what they are missing. But I suppose this is appropriate for Apple programmers who are more concerned about which pixels appear in a drop down list box than the overall job their program is attempting to do.
> the largest collection of illegally copied VHS tapes I've ever seen. They insisted it was legal because they weren't distributing, which is nonsense.

To expand on this: The only legal way to record copyrighted material is to do it to time-shift, meaning you record it, watch it once, and then destroy the copy. That is it.

This was settled in the Supreme Court case Sony v Universal, back when 'Sony' meant 'Betamax', as detailed in this page:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/464_US_417.htm
I do not know whether it users a 'full' constraint solver, nu Mac OS X Lion can use constraints to layout UIs (http://developer.apple.com/library/IOs/ipad/#documentation/T...)
No, I've not seen anyone else doing it. For anyone trying it, I can recall…

• It was fast enough to be undetectable. This was in the days of 50MHz 486DX chips and struggling to fit on a 16MB machine. It used to do the solve on every window display. I think that the system of equations was always easy for the algorithm. (By contrast, the call center work could run into the minutes to solve.)

• lpsolve is more complicated and capable now, but still LGPL.

• As we move to retina displays, the need for integer variables goes away and things get easier. Rounding becomes acceptable.

• Alignment of elements in unrelated boxes was trivial. Rather like designers use grids to enforce order on disparate elements. You could just say "the left edge of this checkbox lines up with the left edge of the section title"

• Somewhere along the years I've misplaced the code.

• I used data structures to express the relationships between elements. This would have be an outstanding use for macros in Dylan to add a syntax for describing user interfaces, but the mindy interpreter didn't support macros.

• It is especially handy in themeable systems, which were all the new thing at the time, since your elements could have different dimensions as needed. I had both Copland and a slightly more compact traditional X11 look.

• Not terribly related but from the same project: if you are using a blocking garbage collector on a GUI, if you can tell when garbage collection will be required soon, then it works well to force a garbage collection at times when the user will not notice it. For instance, after they click an action that takes time you can sneak in a collection and they'll never know. What you want to avoid is something like a menu coming halfway down then a collection triggering.
No, please no. Not the snide novelty swipe. You don't like something, have the guts to say it straight.

But I do think TP was unfair to PT. She's saying things that a lot of strong, smart women I know would agree with. For example: For the most part, women are not complaining about the lack of VC funding in the world. They are complaining about the lack of jobs with flexible hours. That is so true of the women I know that my guess is one would have to be at a statistical frontier to see anything different.
Node.js SDK for Windows Azure released
This is completely orthogonal to the discussion.
Push anxiety, excellent.:w I suffer from write anxiety.:w I've been helping someone learn to program,:w and as I watch him write code I feel more tense the longer he goes:w without writing his file.:w When I mentioned this as a matter of human interest,:w and as an introduction to why you should save often,:w he laughed.:w I'm quite confident I will have the last laugh on him before he truly learns that lesson.:wq
With all due respect for people who've been working on this: Isn't it too late (by at least 5 years)? What's the point of reviving Dylan if it doesn't bring something radically new?

And reading the project status: "No support for threads yet"; Than, isn't it too early to re-release it yet?

Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, and Scala have been fueling my interest in DSL. I don't see what Dylan would bring to the picture that the other languages provide already.
> What one hopes is that they might have clerks who can help them with these things.

Those clerks would be easy prey for lobbyists. "Here is a small gift, make sure to interpret this patent for Sotomayor using this kind of language and not that kind."
Of all the things women are told on a day-in, day-out basis, "you should start a start-up" seems really low on the list in terms of both frequency and maliciousness.

It's also odd to simultaneously state that women are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, but it's somehow damaging to present them with another choice they can decide on. Why, exactly, do we need to protect women against the awful specter of another option in life?
> Also, pot-smoking is smoking.

I don't have anything solid to back this up, but I was under the impression that in places where cannabis is legal/decriminalised/cheaper, there's an increase in oral consumption, rather than smoking (e.g. hash brownies)

I'd imagine this is partly because there's a certain element of wastage or perceived loss, and the ready availability makes it more practical. Then again, things like longer onset time and duration might turn some people off.
It's not the best wording but doesn't necessarily imply that the payment is dependent on handling the IPN, just that the retrying is affected by the handling.

But it is unforgivable that there does not seem to be any mention of what response the PayPal server is expecting to indicate that the IPN has been successfully caught.
Thoughtbot posted a similar Postgres article recently:

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/13829210385/the-durable-do...
Just For Fun - The World's Easiest Musical Instrument
It would probably help if they just put the number of "Other"/spam messages next to the "Other" button. I had no idea there was anything in there until I checked just now. Maybe they think it looks bad showing how many spam-ish messages you are receiving?
"A truly interactive chart would let you zoom in and out ... and so on."

dchester's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3340609) links to http://shutterstock.github.com/rickshaw/examples/extensions...., which demonstrates some of Rickshaw's interactions.
As the other kind reply to your comment said, sometimes access to open stacks and circulating privileges are distinct. Here in Minnesota, any member of the general public can enter the open stacks of all the University of Minnesota Libraries. I can readily gain circulating privileges as a "friend of the library" for a small fee, made smaller in my case because there is discounted membership fee for being a friend of the library for members of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association.

When I lived in Washington State, I had no particular connection with U Dub, but I could also walk onto campus and walk into the library shelving areas with no problem. When I wanted to circulate books, I looked up the state administrative regulations (it helped that I was working as a lawyer, so I knew how to look those up) and found out that a state regulation basically allows most state residents to obtain circulating privileges at University of Washington libraries for the payment of a small fee. That library has a GREAT collection of materials on east Asian languages, and I circulated some of those while I was living in Washington state.
Pincus Faceoff With Zuckerberg Shows Fearsome Prelude to Zynga’s IPO: Tech
I don't think her argument is meant to be taken exclusively for women. It's just that women are singled out as needing to be told to do a startup. The assumption is that there's no way a woman would freely choose to downshift her career for children, so it must be because of hidden sexism. Her argument was meant to specifically address this misconception.

It doesn't mean the same thing doesn't apply to men, its just that this particular misconception applies to woman so that's where she's focusing her argument.

Natural vs unnatural is a complete red-herring. I agree that we all should stop using that word in discussions like this. It carries too many connotations and it implies beliefs that I don't think anyone has (that someone that deviates from "natural" behavior is wrong).
228MB of data is nothing, it fits in RAM of any machine. What would the examples in this blog post look like if it was 228GB

You bring up an interesting point. At what data size do the companies using the various NoSQL DBs feel they have to move beyond a traditional RDBMS? I work with some traditional RDBMS stores now that are >500GB in size with tables that add 20M-30M rows/month and querying still isn't an issue. Admittedly it takes expertise to optimize the system and make it work efficiently, but that's going to be the case with any datastore.
All university libraries in Germany are open to the general public if you have an ID card/passport.

For some libraries you have to pay a small fee to get an access card. The mentioned Grimm Zentrum/HU library is free of charge:

"The Humboldt University Library is a scientific library open to the general public. Every person over sixteen years of age and resident in Germany may register to use it in accordance with the Library's Benutzungsordnung (Regulations of Use)." => see http://www.ub.hu-berlin.de/using-the-library/registration

Some libraries limit the borrowing of books (depends on the library) to university members (usually because of high demand) but you can almost always read the book while at the library.

Of course it's not allowed to do commercial work like coding on your startup, but if you don't annoy the people, probably nobody will care...
Kindle Touch doesn't run Android. You are thinking of the Fire.
> astrology

Astronomy is the correct word here. Astrology is horoscopes and the like.
As an American, let me preface this by saying that I am in no way opposed to immigration. I am in no way opposed to other cultures. Many of my good friends are not Americans.

Here is my problem, though - I look around my floor in a NYC office (I'm a software engineer) and I see very few people who are American citizens.

To me, that is very discouraging. It shows that me that Americans who live in the US are becoming less competitive than people from other countries when it comes to technical careers.

Again, let me strongly state that I'm have no problem with people from other countries coming to work here - I'm just making an observation that it is somewhat sad that American companies simply cannot find enough Americans to do jobs in America.

So what happens if we make the immigration process far easier? I see a lot of complaints in this thread about how difficult/how long of a process it is. But what happens when people from other countries flood in? What happens to the fewer competitive Americans here? Suddenly, it's more expensive to hire them. More expensive to keep them on.

I think I have legitimate concerns. They make me less inclined to support making the process easier. Maybe I'm wrong about what I suspect will happen if we let people flood in - and if you think I'm wrong, I'm more than happy to examine any resources that you feel might help me change my mind. However, I don't think I'm wrong. I think it would be a disaster for American workers.
I wouldn't want to generate HTML with this, but it could be very useful for generating guaranteed-to-be-valid XML.

(That said, aside from Atom feeds I haven't had the need to output XML rather than JSON in a very long time)
I know C, java, JavaScript, ruby, python (sorta), etc.
but yes, Learning C about a year ago was quite useful for revealing more about how the hardware actually works.
Again, physical analogies don't work for this. But you're wrong. It isn't stealing in the classic sense of the word. Yes, you still have your original work but then you have someone else out there who can potentially be profiting from your work. It's like bootlegged DVDs. Sure, the creator can still sell them in store but then he's also losing sales to the bootleggers who sell it for less than half the cost.

Just because someone wouldn't buy something to begin with doesn't mean they should be able to get it free. If I wrote a piece of software that was really useful and popular but some people couldn't afford it, well, they should save up or ask someone to buy it for them. If they get it illegally that means they wanted it badly enough that they would have paid had there been no free version on the black market.

We geeks get the distinction but you gloss over the many other ways the original author still loses out on the deal. Sure, the original creator can still sell his heart out but there are now competing sources that shouldn't be there no matter how you look at it.
"If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying."

This comment from the article gets at the heart of what the author is trying to say. Behind the desire to single out women as a group that needs a special invitation to pursue a career doing startups are two assumptions: 1) that women actually want a career doing startups and 2) that they do not feel empowered to pursue that course on their own.

The author simply isn't comfortable making those assumptions, which point of view is completely valid given the subjectivity of the topic.
World's first programmable quantum photonic chip
Ah, compiling C is so pleasantly fast.
As I recall, for Google Video Search, we used domains like "1.vgc1.com" "2.vgc2.com" etc for cookieless hosting. A short domain name (as opposed to 'cookieless.googleserving.googlevideo.com' or some such) saves bytes in the HTML, and cookieless domains save bytes in requests, as well as providing better cache hit rates and such. Multiplexing domains lets the browser initiate several simultaneous requests for scripts, images, css, etc. (I think this is less of a problem these days, though.)

Some of these problems are addressed by modern browsers and other techniques, but getting good performance out of the median web browser remains a big challenge.
> no theft intended

And this is where you lose them. It is only theft to them if you take something and leave nothing. If you take something and leave the same thing, it is copying.

Honestly, you might as well try to equate copyright infringement with rape. It would make precisely as much sense to them.
This was linked on Less Wrong just before Thanksgiving (http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8ik/link_walking_throug... ) and I left this comment:

There is an old trick to help you remember something; concentrate on remembering peripheral things, recovering the context, where you were and what you were doing, when you heard or saw what you want to remember. I'm not surprised that it works in reverse, changing contexts interfering with recall, as well.

ADDED: Actually, the link in the LW post was to an earlier paper, to which the one here is a follow-up. But this one was also linked to in the comments.
Whoops, fixed that. Thanks.
Except copying also doesn't involve pain.
All plugins are hosted on our server and maintained in the open source git repo. We have a subdomain CDN using mod_alias right now, so in case many sites use this we can easily switch to S3 or another CDN to balance load and serve the eggs unscrambled (ha!). I mean, why wouldn't you want a unicorn plotting rainbows all over your page?
WTF: US Government pull Youtube Video for National Security Reason
Your diatribe would have been slightly less absurd had you realized that this article described what Objective-C was like fifteen years ago: indeed the article predates OS X. Things have changed.
> If they get it illegally that means they wanted it badly enough that they would have paid had there been no free version on the black market.

No. This is factually incorrect.
Or it might be as easy as writing a compiler. These things are hard to prejudge.
This is not always a bad thing. Consider the following:

my $current_month = Month->new();
my $end_month = Month->new()->plus_months(4);
while ($current_month <= $end_month) {
$yyyymm = $current_month->strftme("%Y%m");
$last_day = $current_month->last_date()->strftime("%Y%m%d");
$first_day = $current_month->first_date()->strftime("%Y%m%d");

$dbh->do("create table my_partitioned_table_$yyyymm
() inherits from my_partitioned_table");
$dbh->do("alter table my_partitioned_table_$yyyymm
add constraint ck_my_partitioned_table_$yyyymm
check (date between '$first_day'::Date and '$last_day'::Date)");

$current_month->next_month();
}

This makes sure that my_partitioned_table has month-based partitions 4 months into the future (so long as you keep it on cron).
Once again, my point is nothing to do with comparing two crimes, it's to do with committing a crime and using a pointless disclaimer.
Ok, that example has a slider. That slider was hard to spot.

Pretty awful choice of UI; wonder if the basic chart classes are designed to be extended with a better zoom UI?

Also, what about fetching of remote data of variable resolution? I might have millions of data points on the server; I want the chart to fetch a subset of the data based on the current resolution and bounding box of the axis.