skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can we call Mono a failed platform yet?
It has been seven and a half years now.

Mono has come a long way but who cares?

Does anyone use cocoa-sharp, gtk-sharp, or Moonlight for anything mission critical?

Has a book been written on Mono in the last four years?

Why was there no "Mono Summit" this year?

I was at Miguel de Icaza's talk at the PDC and would sware on a stack of bibles that he was on some sort of drug. It was borderline nonsensical, I had to walk out after less than thirty minutes.

MDB is still terrible.

Their GC is still terrible.

f-spot is slow.
banshee is terrible.
What's all the hub-bub over tomboy? Its a post-it app?
gnome-do <eh> whatever.

Their community seems to be becoming ever more cloistered as time goes on.

I'd hate to say it but I think Mono is circling the drain.

I contend that Mono is a failed platform and will never be able to sustain a stable user / developer base on Linux or Windows.

Discuss.
Aw, shucks. Thanks a ton.

Not that much, surprisingly. The guy really wasn't very subtle with it. I've messed with spoof accounts in my past - I used to have an unpopular forum and I thought it would help raise user activity - and there are a lot of things that can clue you off. In this case, his accounts weren't saying rational things. I dissed the article, and one person would tell me I was being irrational, I'd respond: another person would call me an asshole and a third person would agree and call me a jerkwad. And it all seemed focused around the one thread (I'm a big fan of Rand and Gladwell, and really liked the discussion). All I did was scroll through and look for the anti-Rand people who only had a few points of karma.

Once you have the names, it was just a matter of looking at their comments. In this thread, I said to look at the time between posts: it was a lot easier than that, because I was in class and could just refresh once every fifteen minutes. One name did the talking each cycle, and each time I'd get downvoted one and his names would all get upvoted one.

This was bizarre, though. He was incredibly aggressive about the post, and extremely blatant. On this site, that stood out a lot: usually, people who insult other people get instantly downvoted. That happened to me a lot when I first joined. Here, a bunch of people were doing that and getting upvoted. I just hope this site never becomes diluted enough that something like that fails to stand out.
Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM.

You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)
Your attacks on mono-based apps are shallow and pointless. They afford your argument against the platform nothing.
I agree. It just takes a lot of time and patience, as the job market cooled off a lot. Also employers have a lot more choice now, so they can be picky.

I think the days where fresh grads could get 90k are gone. Back to sanity.
When To Work For Free
I'll speak for myself and say that I spent my teenage years sure that I could do so much more. Some of my best years were wasted listening to other teenagers tell me teir bad drinking stories. Boooo
A look at message queuing projects
I have a little pet name for the horrid places that are planted in the middle of sub/exurban parking lots - "subsidized corn dispensaries". You know the places - 'patios' that have a lovely view of all the parked cars, fake meaningless paraphernalia on the walls, facades that try to vaguely evoke real architectures and all they have on the menu is corn, wrapped in corn, fried in corn then served with a side of corn.

Around here they are known as "East Side Marios" or "Jack Astor's", around your place they might be "Chotcki's" or whatever, but we know they're all the same crap.
Anthropic arguments frustrate me to no end.

1.) "Life as we know it" is an extremely important phrase. Ask a biologist what life is, and she will probably say something about cells and DNA. It is possible for other self-replicating combinations of molecules to exist, but not on Earth, because the Cell/DNA model has become so effective at wiping the competition out. It's actually really hard to come to a solid definition of what "life" is, but if you make it sufficiently broad, I suspect you could find life even in some universes where the fundamental constants differ significantly from ours.

2.) We have no idea what determines the fundamental constants. You cannot talk about the "odds" of having a universe like ours until you know the probability distributions for each of the fundamental constants. Look at the H2O on Earth, and you will find that a significant portion of it occurs at 0C and 100C. Of course that is not a coincidence - water often exists at those temperatures because energy is spent on converting state, not on altering temperature. It's an equilibrium point. So likewise, it's POSSIBLE that the fundamental constants (of multiple universes, if they exist) interact in ways that cause them to arrive at equilibrium points. One really fascinating theory promoting this idea (and any theory is as good as the next, since we have very little empirical evidence available to us) is Lee Smolin's argument that the singularities within blackholes are themselves universe phases. Thus, a kind of "natural selection" of black holes occurs, which leads to more and more universes with fundamental constants ideal for producing black holes (and thus close to the constants necessary for life).

3.) The anthropic principle is just way too convenient, and I fear it de-motivates scientists from looking deeper into issues that really need explaining. Roger Penrose argues that there is a surprising lack of parsimony on behalf of whatever forces (spiritual or natural) brought about our universe. While our universe appears to have inflated from an initial region with a phase-space-volume of 10^(10^123), it would have been more than sufficient to create a life-supporting universe (several! in fact) from a region with only a phase-space-volume of 10^(10^117). Additionally, Penrose points out that the odds of creating an exact duplicate of our solar system from the random coming together of gas and radiation (no Darwinian evolution necessary!) is only 1 in 10^(10^60). (Penrose calls it "utter chicken feed" compared to the odds of the Big Bang producing ANY universe of our size). So even when you invoke the anthropic principle, the question still remains - why is our (life-supporting) universe so large and so old, when we could have done with so much less?
True, but they might notice 1440 requests in the same day from the same IP.
If I had a site that was scrape-worthy, I wouldn't care about it if the people were respectful about it (wait a second or to in between requests, don't hammer my server).

From the business side, I could see them getting a bit grumpy about it, but if it's publicly available information, and there's nothing in their TOS about it, I don't see how they could do anything about it - again, unless you're being a dick with your scraper.

Does anyone know off the top of their head if there are any relevant court cases dealing with scraping?
I'm certainly betting my wife finds me "fucking awesome" for bringing food back home, and no worries. :)

What would be your definition of being "fucking awesome"?
Emacs makes my left pinky hurt.
Idle thought: Here in Australia, you don't have to deal with sales tax until you've reached about $50,000 per annum income. I always thought this limit should be much higher, say $200,000, since it is in society's interest for small businesses to keep growing to that stage anyway.
practice perfect makes perfect
The idea that science should even come up with an "alternative" to that bullshit is an insult to science.
Didn't even mention YC.
Start Your Own Small Business Today
What I find fascinating is that I've been following Kevin's advice about PR - tweet, comment, etc. etc. It works, though it takes some basic notoriety to start with, and some persistence.
I liked the technical explanation quite a bit.
Ha, you can tell right where I clicked away.
I learned something new today, from this article, with the lovely comment "Who needs .gvimrc?"

if has('gui_running')
In the comment you first replied to I did just that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=359751

EDIT I see now you were part of the sockpuppet trolling rampage. Now defeated and deleted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360128
Unsurprising. I wouldn't feel safe with a normal sized car in many places with so many large vehicles driven by barely experienced drivers (teenagers and soccer-parents.)
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. I felt like it was a prerequisite for useful CL/Clojure work, though it probably isn't really.

It'd be especially nice to see someone's who'd used Vim for 5+ years and then switched so there's setups for maybe Viper, etc.
Nice list, here's my additions to it: http://blog.learnr.org/post/59098925/configuring-vim-some-mo...
In Situation 2 you have pledged your house against the 100K loan, the fact that an LLC is involved is immaterial. There is nothing that can protect you when you want to take equity out of your house and you lose all of the money.

Situation 3, you borrow money to start your business, it takes off, you pay it back and your business continues to grow. Later you are sued and lose a 10M lawsuit wiping out all of the assets in your business and then some. If you have a corporation your personal assets are normally protected from this loss. Alternatively your large and growing business is struck by a meteorite (which can come in many forms) that wipes out all of your assets but leaves you with the liabilities. If you are incorporated winding down the business normally doesn't affect your personal assets.
I don't think you have anything to worry about. I've scraped Yahoo finance before at about a 1 second request rate, using perl's YahooFinance module.
You're free to ignore me, but what I see is someone really impressed with their technical prowess and the engineering that went into this software.

It looks like cool technology, but the packaging is all wrong. A command line tool?

I'd build a seamless front-end a la JungleDisk and bill it as an online safe deposit box -- nobody but you has the key.

Just my $0.02.
Do you think no one notices your 1 karma and your freshly created account?

If you want us to have any faith in what you're saying, you may want to (a) spend some time with this community first and (b) post material that actually backs up your accusations against the Mono project.
Scarsdale Diet
Lots of info on the diet with helpful reviews of other diets like the Atkins diet and South Beach diet.
I did this exact same thing a few years ago only stripping the data from nasdaq.com using Perl. I used to hit their site once every 2 seconds times roughly 2500 stocks every day for about 6 months. I would only grab as much data as I needed. They never contacted me or blocked my IP address. I also had a friend who was doing the same thing for a longer period of time.

From experience, I would not recommend getting your data from Yahoo. I looked at them first, but their data is just not as good as the source.

If you would like more information or my notes on how I reverse-engineered the nasdaq.com URL scheme please send me an email.
Impressive to see this level of commitment? Perhaps.

But this "level of commitment" can be extraordinarily unhealthy. I enabled the procrastination feature and I find myself hitting "override" every day.

sigh
Well, a lot more Japanese and Korean companies are congolomerates. They jump to different areas all the time. In fact, about half the South Korea GDP is produced by four companies - Hyundai, Samsung, LG and SK. In Seoul there is an entire mall devoted to Hyundai products.

If you want a good American example, try GE. Started by Edison to sell various electrical inventions, part of the original Dow Jones in 1896, nowadays GE includes finance, energy, NBC, airplane and train engines, all sorts of crazy stuff.
I wonder if a factor is that Jobs makes many more attempts than most people, and goes from "failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" - but we remember the successes? He's had failures that would wash up most of us. Meanwhile, he gets better and better, while others give up.

I agree that not everybody can "remove everything but the essentials" - but I think that everybody can try to do it; can practice it. The difficulty is in knowing what the essentials are, which requires knowing what you are really doing, and what it needs. Through practice, we improve.

Could it be as simple as believing in your intuition? I mean: to consider what you believe is essential, and then act on it And find out if you were right or not. Then repeat many times. Without loss of enthusiasm...
You may try http://www.webalizer.org/
To some extent, actually, yes. Here's a way of doing it.

Let us say that a hyper-advanced civilization has the ability, through simulations or otherwise, of calculating the odds of life arising in a universe with given initial conditions and fundamental constants (to some rough accuracy). They can test billions of possible initial states, including our own, and use that to see whether we lie in a very probable location in phase space or an improbable one. If the location is probable, it strongly supports the multiverse theory.

If the location is improbable, the theory is likely false. For example, if the average probability of life arising in a given universe in some chunk of phase space that includes ours is 40%, and ours is in a subsection of that phase space with a 30% probability, the multiverse theory is not falsified. If ours is in a subsection of that phase space with a 0.000001% probability (far lower than average), it suggests that multiverse is unlikely, because our existence seems to be in violation of pure chance.

The same method can be used to falsify evolution. Test billions of simulations of the Earth's development of life, and see where our species falls statistically. If we're in a probable area of the phase space (phase space of possible sentient creatures to evolve), our understanding of evolution is likely correct, and if we're in a very improbable area (many many standard deviations away from the most likely), our understanding must be flawed somewhere.
Wait! Procrastination feature? What's this?

I try to take things in shifts. Some days I don't check Hacker News at all: I work on writing and design. But I usually don't write unless I'm absolutely in the mood, and so this is a perfect outlet: it's a great place for me to refine my thoughts, and to talk to people that disagree with me about things. It helps me keep an open mind. And once in a while, I read something here that provokes me to write something new. (I wrote one of my current favorite poems after clicking a link on Reddit, for instance.)
From my experience the only reliable source of historical stock data is the exchange source. Nasdaq.com records go back to January 2nd, 1990.
You got my hopes up. I was expecting something interesting and directly FSM-related.

Not exactly an on-topic title, unless I missed something.
If you contact someone at Yahoo, the response will be, do not scrape us in any way.

The problem with financial data is that Yahoo (like most other sites where you might find this data) doesn't generate this data themselves. They license it from other companies, and the licensing agreement typically prohibits or greatly restricts Yahoo's ability to provide the data to third parties.

That said, if Yahoo is not aware that you are scraping them, they cannot stop you. They certainly do have anti-scraper algorithms (you will start getting http 999 errors) but they will not kick in until you cross some invisible threshold. You can probably use Tor with no problem.

Although, if you get large enough that someone notices, you will probably get some sort of cease & desist letter. Depending on your goals that might not be a problem for you.
Aussie Internet censorship plan backlash
Obama's vision of a scientific America
I think it's got to be all or nothing, and I would vastly prefer nothing.
"Startup founder skills?" Are there such things? If you look at it one way, pretty much any skill can be a "founder skill" if you use it right.

I've been working out, if that counts as practicing. I like being able to look at my body and feel a measure of pride in it. And absolutely, if you look good, it influences how other people think of you. I've also been trying to write music: mostly classical-inspired pop. I'm not very good at it, but it gives me something to fiddle with.

If I could say some things that aren't current, though, my two big ones are acting and Dungeon Mastering.

Acting, because it teaches you to become comfortable with your body, your voice, and with other people: you learn much more about your relationship with other things. It teaches you both about how you interact with yourself and about how you can change yourself to get a reaction in other people. Also, because the cliché is true: there's no people like show people. They've vivid and fast and alive, and there's no sort of person I'd rather be with on a boring do-nothing day.

Dungeon Mastering, because it forces you to think. You're dealing with an extremely complex system, you're dealing with four-ish other people who each often know all the rules pertaining to them, and you're dealing with a world that you have to create yourself. Being a good DM means you learn how to handle complex systems and how to innovate within said systems. You need to balance four people at once and keep them all constantly entertained. It requires years of reading and - most likely - years of practice afterwards, but it's profoundly satisfying once you can do it. And D&D players are unique in that any group of players is playing because they love the game. You don't do it as a social move, or as a career move. You very rarely do it to pick up girls. It means you're with people who genuinely love what they do.

(I'd also recommend working out, if you haven't tried it before, because it's an excellent way of calming your mind, and because you really have to focus to get it to work.)
You Have to Stop to Change Direction
Ditch your job and start a business now
Parallelism : Is your code cloud-ready and multi-core friendly? (part 5)
Hiroshima pictures should be seen, but they should be seen alongside pictures of Philipina nuns being were raped and thrown out of third story windows by Japanese soldiers. Pictures of "The Rape of Nanjing". Oh, and throw in a few pics of Unit 731.
http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/germwar/731rev.htm

It would be fun to see pictures of the one million American and ten million Japanese casualties projected during the invasion of Japan, as well.
"you probably can't distinguish the meat of a free-range cow from one that ate nothing but corn"

This is incorrect. Antibiotics, growth hormones, all of that doesn't just disappear from the cow's bloodstream the instant it dies. Just one simple delivery mechanism: Meat is muscle tissue. It is full of blood. Blood carries the various drugs that the cow has been pumped full of to deal with eating corn. You EAT that blood when you eat the meat. Now, certainly some chemicals change when the meat is cooked, but they don't all disappear, nor do they necessarily change into something harmless. Some chemicals may become (more) toxic after being cooked.
TechCrunch doesn't need puppets. It has its fans. I'm not a big TC reader, but I like all the people I've met who work at TechCrunch. They're all genuinely nice folks (though Arrington has the troll gene, so sometimes he goes overboard and picks on someone smaller than him, which is rude and in poor form...but I don't mind when he picks on Google or Yahoo or MS or anyone who's accepted more than a few million in funding).
The meta-question that concerns me is: are those kinds of articles attracting the sort of people that get involved in that kind of crap? That's one of the reasons I am very wary of them.
Do not crawl too fast with yahoo, otherwise you will get 999 error -- which mean you will be banned temporarily.

Search 'yahoo 999' for details.
John Francis walks the Earth - in silence for 17 years.
What do you do to avoid this? I try to name my heavy-lifting methods so that they do not look like simple accessors, but sometimes it is inevitable.

For instance, a large dataset may have a method to get the length of the dataset. If the dataset does not maintain a member variable that has that value, then you have to calculate it. Later, for performance, you might implement an ivar that is updated whenever the dataset changes, thus making the method a simple accessor.
I was on the verge of leaving HN for a while because of the level of comments, especially the particular story in question, with ScottHanson etc on it. You're done a fundamentally good thing, in my opinion.

To catch a thief: I think it's very revealing that the person who was able to recognize this was somebody who has spoofed accounts themselves, and who has insulted other people "a lot" on HN and therefore knew the normal response.

I kind of hope that the perpetrator also has an opportunity to redeem themselves - and who perhaps, one day, might be enabled to do something similarly good as a direct result.
> I would pray every day if I had someone to pray to for a corn famine. Some insect, weather pattern or bacteria or something that just wrecks the entire crop for a few years.

There almost was sometime around 1990. A killer strain of some corn disease was going around and there was serious concern that corn would go extinct. Then someone found a resistant strain somewhere in Mexico and hybridization did the rest.

A friend of mine who happens to be allergic to corn was one of the people tracking the spread of the disease. Then their equipment was destroyed by lightning and they sat blind for several months.
Great writeup. As an outsider, it seems to me like Atlanta has a thriving startup scene. What are some other cities like that?
New plan: if it says "Obama" in the title, I'm flagging it. It's politics.
SpringSource buys Groovy and Grails specialist (G2One)
I hope he has a good spam filter... I know pg pioneered bayesian spam-filtering, but I wonder how well it copes with publicly known email address?

I tend to assume Gmail has the best spam filtering (with their massive database of email), but I still get about 7 per day that it's not sure of, and my account name isn't very publicized.
Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java (free)
So what do you all think of this book?
They should get blossom goodchild to ask the galatic federation of light, perhaps they know :P
I dunno; this talks a little about technology and a geek-friendly topic...

I think there are political articles that could go on YC. For example, if an article talks about the strategics of how a campaign went (it can get technical) or the statistics behind prediction, I think that would be ok...
+1 for attempt at Office Space allusion, and the first paragraph as a whole. "Planted in the middle of sub/exurban parking lots" describes it well.