skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Don't get me wrong - I love to see how the iPad just shattered the barrier of entry for non-technical users, even though I'm a FOSS guy. But I do think that it was at too great (and an unnecessarily so) a cost to the understanding of that technology.

25+ years ago, s/iPad/AppleII\/Mac)/. Was Mac too great and unnecessary cost?

I'm not an Apple fun. The Apple philosophy (and prices) has always been foreign to me. Yet, it isn't possible to dismiss the fact that back then they paved the way for the ubiqutous cheap commodity "inferior to Mac" PC and these days they did it again for these "inferior to iPhone/iPad" devices

http://www.everbuying.com/Wholesale-Notebook-UMPC-MID-b-815....

Some analogy comes with icebreaker ships - they have so much unnecessary stuff, so overbuilt, have so low utility ... until it comes to the 2m thick ice.
You are bringing up the argument for Welfare, Universal Healthcare, etc., that there is nothing that the schools can do. The problems that these kids are facing stems from the fact that they live in poverty. This leads to issues such as the one mentioned by the author. The only way to solve the problem would be to try to figure out a decent Social Benefits system for the poor, to where poor parents do not feel the need to resort to prostitution, drugs, drinking, etc.
Nvidia  Releases CUDA Compiler Source Code
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but I like this too. Your application should just be an API and pages should be tiny programs that call into this API. That way you can easily test your application and easily test your pages. And when you want to release "an API", well, you already designed, implemented, and tested it.
Although I agree that the original post was naive, I do not think that the misleading vividness and hasty generalization employed by Jefferson addresses the issue to which the OP was referring. There is massive hardship across all low income families but the use an outlier scenario does not negate the valid argument that having goals and knowing that there is a prize to win at the end of the race, is a strong motivator.

I inferred that a lack of hope and knowledge of an achievable future, is one of the primary causes of lower performing low income students.
There's insufficient data to draw conclusions about the performance of the infrastructure. The application probably ran on a shared machine. We don't know the impact of the other processes running on the machine. We don't know how many requests the application handled in parallel, so we cannot divide by latency to get throughput. We don't know if the application ran on a modern machine.
How to get a scorpio man in love with you
If you want to have a Scorpio man in love with you, there are some things to keep in mind as you consider pursuing them for a potential mate.
You should be okay.

Once you uninstall a Chrome extension and close all tabs (since code could have been injected into them), there won't be any code related to it running on your machine.

It is still theoretically possible that while a Chrome extension was running that it updated state (via a cookie or otherwise) on webpages you were visiting, so perhaps clearing cookies could be helpful, but I'm not aware of this happening.
WxPython 101: Creating Taskbar Icons
Nice to see HN promotes freely discussing ALL opinions with an open mind.

Oh wait, I see they don't. Apparently if you express opinions that others disagree with, the close minded fops want you banned.

Meh - if I get banned for disagreeing with the standard "poor baby" suicide line, so be it. I'll stick with discussions where EVERYONE is welcome to express their opinions.
Apple Vectors, if you ever need them for a presentation or website design
Here here. Long live the one page web app.
Love this quote. So, I guess iOS devs are cheaper than web devs?

"Our long-term plan is to develop a mobile website, but who has $100,000 to spend on that at a time when magazines are folding all around us?” says Maxwell.
> somebody says "go" my mind alwasys jumps to "feels like a interpreted language".

Because it does! I'm a pretty hardcore Pythonista who has never really gotten very far with compiled languages. I wrote a simple shell in C, once, but beyond that they never felt right. Somehow, Go manages to get things sufficiently "right" for me.

But more importantly, I think Go has a very strong chance of being the Clojure moment for Algol-derived languages. It's trying to address many of the same problems, and taking a similarly refreshing and pragmatic approach. Not to mention that the system-level language ecosystem is quite overdue for some reinvigoration. The glowing tone of so many Go posts may be, in part, due to a fundamental yearning for something that gets so much right -- something like Go -- to finally take off.
It does get better. People get used to contacting you through normal channels again, and they also learn that facebook is another 'in-crowd' and not everyone is on it - you can talk to 'facebookers' on it, but not 'everyone'.
> Once written, the same dust.js template can be rendered not only in the browser, but also on the server using node.js or Rhino.

I'm relieved to see their staff know what they're doing, and even curl http://www.linkedin.com/in/example still yields content. An alarming fraction of devs and toolsets out there would have screwed this up so badly that their resources would be cut off from reuse by the rest of the web, trapped behind an unstable single-site API.
Ask HN: How long did it take to get your first customer?
I think that people are more likely to pay for an app then for a website.. maybe that is why, Apple, Google & Microsoft are pushing apps instead of pushing the web..
I like Twitter because it is simple[1]. 140 char messages, reverse chronological order. That's it.

[1] I use Twitter for Mac, the website is kind of a mess actually.
Christmas Design Tool Kit for Greeting Cards
There’s still time to get your Christmas greeting cards designed and printed! The key to quick, quality designs is to start with the right resources.
I quit Facebook 4 months ago. The relationships that are important to me have improved(even long distance ones), my productivity is up and my depression is down (not sure how that works or if it's related).

I encourage you all to give it a try.
Scapy - a tool every hacker must know
Ask HN: How much should developers fees increase to keep up with demand? 
Developers often undercharge for various reasons. And as demand rises with the developer shortage, it's likely developers won't raise their rates fast enough to follow demand.

What should developers fees be to meet demand, and how much should they increase every period to follow demand?
This is my python version (for logger)

https://gist.github.com/1474991
Clojure made me realize that both of these styles are silly. Why do you need hashrockets, colons, or even commas? Why do you need a key/value separator AND a pair separator?

They might be useful as separators sometimes, but why are the absolutely required? They seem like noise. Anyway... I'll stick with hashrockets because the colon at the end is just confusing.
Except you then divide the total cost by the number of people that bear it, and the term cancels out. Your reasoning implies that two governments merging justifies an increase in the number of restrictions simply because the numbers are bigger.
Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here. The standard way of resolving the problems you describe is in fact to assume that rights are bundles of actionable interests and to compare the interests at stake in a conflict - such as the right of a private property owner to exercise control over a park vs the right of park visitors to express themselves. That comparison is often carried out using economic methods, where possible; obviously it's hard to quantify the utility of free speech to citizens, but many other kinds of rights can be quantified (and the disutility of restricting speech may be quantifiable if the the overall utility of allowing it is not).

Allow me to suggest this book, which is a great introduction to law and economics without being too technical in either subject: http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/d... or if it is not to your taste, this one is good too: http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Order-What-Economics-Matters/dp/0... At the very least, check out Arrow's theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem which explains why ideal procedural outcomes are not possible.
can it somehow incorporate the blink tag as well?
When The NY Times Builds On Other's Work...
There is little to no need for a finance guy at a typical startup. Early stage funding has little to do with real finance, and the books are so simple that they barely need to be done.

So either make stuff or sell stuff. That's about it, really.
Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second
World's smallest orchid: 2mm across
CO2 emissions, birth rate & death rate simulation
Jira. Hands down.
SMTP Support for the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
> misleading vividness

what?

> hasty generalization

there are no generalizations here. the article says that the author of the forbes article (as well as you), as a person or privilege, does not understand poverty and thus has no idea how to solve the problem. if anyone is making "hasty generalizations", its the author of the forbes article, who thinks that poor kids simply aren't trying hard enough.

> the use an outlier scenario

how do you know this is an outlier scenario?

> having goals and knowing that there is a prize to win at the end of the race, is a strong motivator

i doubt anyone would disagree with this statement, but it's irrelevant.

the original forbes article suggests that having goals and determination are sufficient for escaping poverty. this article makes the argument that even with goals and determination, escaping poverty is still extremely difficult; furthermore, the very condition of poverty undermines the ability to develop goals and determination.
No I'm encouraging free will. Who better then each individual to make their own choice to live or die. How can anyone say "just wait, things will get better". Are the people making that hollow promise willing to back that up with healthcare, money, love, success, whatever it takes to make that reality come true? If it's wrong for someone to decide to take their own life, isn't it equally wrong for someone to tell them they shouldn't? Since no one knows what's on the other side of death, making people stay alive when they don't want to be seems totally unwarranted.
These are all valid points. Debugging is probably the most significant. I agree that the syntax can potentially make CoffeeScript hard to read, but this can be easily avoided.

One of the nice thing about CoffeeScript is that it allows one to be selective about the syntax. For example, unlike the author I will use keywords like is, isnt, or, and, yes, no, on, off because I find it easier to read that way. However, I dislike the calling functions without the parentheses and I dislike the long one-line comprehensions. Instead of doing this:

eat cheese for cheese in cheeses when cheese is blue

I would do:

for cheese in cheeses
if cheese is blue
eat(cheese)

I can have a minimal syntax, but retain some of the unnecessary bits to make it easier to read. If the author finds themselves writing code that is hard to read, they should just not write it that way. Write it the way you (and your team) like it to be written.
This is not true. I know people that have contributed code to Android that don't work for Google (etc.) and that have their code on released devices now. Sure, someone may have already fixed the bug by the time you get to see the source code, but if the bug is obscure enough, your code is as good as anyone else's. (Also, features are probably always welcome.)
SEEKING FREELANCER, San Francisco. Prefer local, remote possible

Variable task load, supporting live mobile game product. PHP/mySQL backend, running on Symfony framework on Amazon EC2. Will involve bug fixing as well as implementing support for new features and mobile platforms. First task would be to make existing tech support Android players. (game is currently iOS only).

email jobs@roguerocketgames.com

thanks
Uh oh, there may be more than 10 worthwhile open source projects. Oh noes!
This article alludes to the "bee sting" theory of poverty (see http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/... ).

That brings up an interesting question: in historical terms, the subject of this story is quite well-off; he's not always physically at risk, he has ready access to probably non-toxic food, he has shelter, etc. Over a long enough timeline, his life is pretty good. Even his home situation--mom is a prostitute, but he can't tell anyone lest the authorities separate them--is in all likelihood less common than it might have been centuries ago.

So if these conditions are so awful that we can't possibly expect people to improve without fixing said conditions, how do we explain historical economic growth. We're descended from people who had really miserable lives: sleep in a cave, hope you can hunt or gather enough food to stay alive, go to sleep hungry more often than not, risk death by infection every time you get a cut that's more than skin deep, and reproduce through what any modern person would call serial rape. Beings that were physiologically human (basically us, but probably lactose intolerant) had to deal with all of those circumstances, and managed to bequeath to the next generation some slightly less miserable circumstances.

It comes back to the anthropic principle: if misery is a strong disincentive for progress, how did we progress to the point that we have leisure time to discuss this?

(I've asked the same question on Quora here: http://www.quora.com/How-do-adherents-to-the-bee-sting-theor... . I am very interested in the answers.)
One of the most frequently overlooked issues is that wealthy people know that there's even a better way to begin with. If you don't have a decent mentor, how do you even know that there are decent mentors available? The example of google scholar: we know it exists, but we're in an ecosystem that tells us these things - how do you get into that ecosystem?

I've been poor and still kind of am, but I've never known real poverty. I've seen real poverty in others and there's no way in hell I'd want to start from there. The biggest hurdle to escaping endemic poverty is even knowing that there's a way out in the first place.
I think your first point is fair, but those giants are pushing them because they can easily install themselves as gateway and take a fat cut.
C++ has std::clog (http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/clog/) but most people haven't heard of it and it maps to stderr anyway.
A New Code of Character
Then somebody will come out with a free app that does the something or better than the paid app. Lather, rinse, repeat. Blah.
Very nice! An option to set the refresh frequency would be useful.
"What to Submit ... anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." [1]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thank you for the correction. I'd been using terminology ineffectively. The way I was taught it was:

- An algorithm is a step-by-step process for transforming any valid input into a specific valid output.
- A heuristic is a process that brings you closer to something that looks like an answer, but does not necessarily find the best possible answer.
The "symbols are more comprehensible" thing is a bunch of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Not the least of all because 'and' and '&&' are both obviously symbolic, just with different symbols.
I think apps are popular because they are more concrete than the web.

A user knows where an app starts and ends and they know what icon they need to touch to get there.

Websites are far more ethereal and it isn't as clear when you've left one site and landed on another. And it's much harder remembering how to get there.

Case in point: how many people type 'facebook' into google and click the first link instead of entering 'www.facebook.com' into the address bar.
I've done a fair bit of Go programming (https://github.com/jbarham), but have programmed professionally mostly in Python for the past 10 years, and for me Go does feel an interpreted language because it requires so few type declarations compared to mainstream statically typed languages like C++ or Java.

Checking the app source code for the article at http://code.google.com/p/go-thanksgiving/source/browse/app/a..., the only type declaration I can see in the body of a function is in a type switch where it obviously makes sense. Otherwise the code uses the combined declaration and assignment := operator (http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html#Short_variable_declaratio...) which is type-safe because it infers the types from the value(s) on the right hand side. IMO this is even better than working w/ a dynamically typed language like Python because the required parameter type declarations in the function declaration tell you the types you're dealing with, but unlike C++ or Java you don't have to repeat that information back to the compiler.
If you frequented a lot of bars as a designated driver and the insurance companies gained access to your location data, what do you think would happen to your rates?

Nothing, because my location data doesn't tell you whether I'm a driver or a passenger. Even if the insurance companies do have that information, your example depends on their being oblivious to the existence of designated drivers. I might, for example, be operating a taxi or limousine service, where my job is to drive drunken people around while they have a good time.

I'm all about corner cases, but it does not follow that paranoia is the sensible position to take. I can just as easily suggest corner cases where insurance companies decide to skip the analysis, increase premiums on everyone evenly, and blame inflation, because it considerably lowers their overhead and the administrative savings offset a good deal of the increased payouts, so that the premiums don't rise too much. Unsustainable over any period but the very short term, of course, but many would argue that something very similar happened at AIG in the runup to the financial crisis. Not performing proper diligence on the financial instruments whose risk they were insuring against (via credit default swaps) looked like financial genius until the claims suddenly exceeded the value of the premiums. That's why it's cheaper to pay actuaries than to place your faith in people's common sense.

There are different interests to be balanced here, but it seems to me you are complaining about the existence of the scales (ie the court).
I think that's an unfair statement though because Facebook can do a lot more than a Rolodex. I think we need to know more about how people spend their time on Facebook.

If they're spending time on games like Farmville, that's quite different from spending time looking at photos/profiles/statuses
I was originally thinking this would break things like IDENT, but then I remembered that they use the entire tuple (d'oh). I'll take your word for the pf behavior, and retract my bogus guess about kernel NAT. :-)
Though I'm not a zsh user, my first reaction was likewise "meh, my shell can do that", and so I whipped up a pretty much identical command (only using sed). However, when it didn't behave quite as I expected, I dug a little deeper and ended up with (what was to me) a curious discovery: bash prints its prompt to stderr rather than stdout (see http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/parse.y#n5013).

Anyone know why it does that?
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Lenovo ThinkPad X220 Price in India, US, UK 12.5 inch
I really liked the turkey, and I thought the solution looked elegant, so I had a go at it in CoffeeScript and node-canvas: https://gist.github.com/1475034

All requests in less than 66 ms, mean less than 19 ms.
This is such a superficial argument — even more superficial than the feature it's criticizing. It's only possibly misleading if you aren't familiar with the syntax, and that's true of a whole boatload of things, such as block syntax. The hashrocket itself looks bizarre and excessively noisy to people coming from JavaScript or Python or pretty much anything but PHP.

This really is just, "I am not used to this syntax, so it looks weird to me." It's the same argument some people make against calling methods without parentheses in Ruby. If you're the sort of person who writes "self.houses().map(){|house| house.sale_price()}.sort()", then I guess at least you're being consistent. If not, don't be that guy.

More philosophically, Ruby is a TIMTOWTDI language. There are five different and largely interchangeable ways to create a Proc, half the core library methods are aliases for other methods, several keywords are just slight variations on each other for no purpose other than to give you options, you can take or leave parentheses, etc. The new hash syntax is just one more example of this ethos. If this embarrassment of ways to write any given program bothers you (and you're certainly in good company if it does), you'd probably be more at home with Python. (I don't mean to tell anyone their business, I'm just saying, "only one way to do it" is the Python philosophy.)
I love generators! They produce attractive code that is understandable (once one really understands what a generator is)

I remember using one when I was building a Mail DB search appliance (on the backburner..) with the mail retrieval code being this:

https://gist.github.com/1014045

Basically, after importing, retrieving emails is as simple as this:

get_messages, close_server = __pop3()
all_messages = get_messages()
for message in all_messages:
fn(message)
close_server()

__pop3 returning a simple generator, while close_server deals with shutting off the server / cleaning up the closure itself. No need to retrieve/initialize all the emails at once (with the memory / other overhead involved); just one at a time (with the connection being kept open in the background). Normally if you'd want to do that, you'd have to stick the "message handling code" into the "message retrieval code", or at least pass along a "handling" function - neither of which really seems that kosher to me. Generators solved that problem handily.
If you split stdout and stderr, you can end up with the order of output changing - your output process might not get around to reading its input ends until it has data at both, and then it can't tell which is which.
For classes, I'm still unclear as to why you might even use the thin arrow, lest you're providing a mixin. Thoughts?
This actually doesn't work for processes using stderr on eglibc 2.13 - fprintf internally outputs via a different path that can't be hooked in this manner. On x86, you could try overwriting the system call gate pointer to a hook function, but on x86_64 you're basically stuck, unless you attach a debugger or something.

Also, the write prototype is incorrect (using int instead of size_t) and could break on 64-bit machines.
Not everything is about simplification or minimization. Much like serifs on fonts, syntax aids readability and therefore understanding. Not needing to study the wider context to determine if some collection declaration is a list or hash is invaluable to my time.
how some non-negligible percentage of people can achieve at least moderate success, not how a handful of people can do something anomalous that gets famous

The internet is unarguably a huge advantage for people on the lower end. There are some people who have been knocked form being successful in the traditional media to being successful on the internet only, but that internet group includes them and people who would have never been successful in the traditional media. I don't even think that's a question. The only reason someone who would have been successful in traditional media isn't successful on the Internet is that the increased ease of competition made it clear that they suck and they pushed them out.