skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. The author is loading the word "weaker" with another meaning; a meaningless one at that: who would write an article with a title such as "It's official: Humans really are the weaker species" if it were shown that cyanide contamination the world over was having a negative effect on all people?
I just meant that they don't come from practice. I wasn't trying to make a call about how much they're inborn vs due to outside influences.
Shovebox is exceptional--a killer app for my productivity with little scraps.
Wow. Somehow I missed all this vitriol against MySQL when I was figuring out whether to use MySQL vs Postgres a year ago. Then again I am not a DB expert and MySQL was good enough for what I was doing.
Could prove tricky. After all, Tetris is NP-complete: http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CC/0210020

(kind of an interesting proof -- they reduce it to the problem of partitioning multisets of numbers into groups of equal sums)
Where do you write for? Your own work, as a solo artist/band? Or for a soundtrack or something? This is something I've been wanting to get into and would love more information about.
> You can drop a note to an acquisitions editor to see if any authors have refused their right to revise.

I'm not really familiar with the lingo, but what is an acquisitions editor and/or where can I find one? There's several topics that I am extremely comfortable with and could see myself writing on.
The year was 1890. Only 15 years ago did Koch prove for the first time that diseases were caused by germs. Most of the world still believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The scientific consensus was that "ether" pervaded all of space. Men of stature made confident pronouncements that nothing man-made would ever fly.

Almost everything is obvious in retrospect. And being boring is not a strike against a scientific hypothesis.
That makes me want to visit there barefoot :)
Just spotted this response - astute!

That might well explain the unwillingness of so many to move over even after .NET started to deliver the goods (from version 1.1)
Interesting. I wrote something very much like this for internal use at my company. Basically we have a lot of legacy alerts and messages and reports that are "dumb" (i.e. if a cron job runs once a minute to detect problems within one minute it will keep on mailing until it's fixed because it has no state) so the new mail system sits in front of it all and says, hmm, saw that a minute ago, won't bother the humans with it again, they're probably busy actually fixing it.

It's not, and never will be, a general purpose mail server - old-fashioned SMTP servers have their flaws but it's as good as it gets if you want mail that can reach anyone, anywhere.
re: performance, any smtp mail server worth its salt will be limited by I/O write performance (email should be sync'd to stable storage before signalling acceptance). CPU spent pushing data over pipes/unix sockets won't register. I don't see any measurements in there, so it sounds like "X Windows is slow because it has to talk over a socket" analysis.

"The short version: Classes and methods beats pipes and processes."

Well, it depends. For latency on when processing a single large email, yes, perhaps. One-pass processing will give you that (although I think he skipped over how SoS manages to hand off incoming email to SpamAssassin without "passing it over a pipe to a perl process")? Surely we are trying to compare like with like, right?

But mail processing is a parallel activity. Reducing latency on a single message is not the same thing as improving throughput. What do we find out about that?

"But, sendmail and postfix are still way better at huge scale bulk, so it relays to them."

Ah, OK. So this is a boutique solution, for personalised handling of small-site stuff. Guess what? We already have that, since (as noted by the spamassassin example) you can set up the big solutions to hand off a message to you to process in the language of your choice.

Sorry for -ve rant. I didn't see any -ve comments in this section and wanted a little critical balance. Nice software is always nice, and you don't have to have a reason to want to write it.

But I don't like unjustified justifications. If you're going to claim better performance, give numbers.
The way we find
There are plenty of capitalists with agendas :)
Every language has its share of good and bad books to learn from. There's no reason ObjC/Cocoa (or GNUStep if thats your thing) is different.
Karmic justice: Gen. Eric Shinseki
Brilliant PR.
Ask HN: problem is, web apps can't act as clients?
What is the best way to deal with the problem that due to (sensible) security constraints, web apps can't act as clients to other web apps (unless I am missing something)? The only way to access another web app through a web app is to go through the server, which means the user has to give web app A his account+password for web app B.

With Twitter tools we see one possible solution: all twitter tools I have seen (like twitpic or twitterfeed) just ask you for your twitter password. People seem to happily use it, but I would guess it is only because they don't think their Twitter account is very valuable. Try doing the same for ebay, though?

I guess at least web apps should provide a way for users to generate "secondary access" to their accounts (like on FLickr you can share certain photosets, but not others). But few do, so it is not a universal solution.

Or maybe people just have to learn to trust?
Yes, which is why I always love the fact that people cherry-pick examples like that and ignore things like, oh, unifying the type system, going Unicode-only for strings, adding optional annotations for type analysis...

Picking on changes like "print()" all too often betrays either ignorance of what's in Python 3.0, or a desire to misinform others about the same. I hope neither of those is your intention here.
Actually, those statistics are for people with only a bachelor's degree. My guess is that people with graduate degrees start out with higher salaries but may converge with those with only bachelors when experience begins to outweigh degree.

From the WSJ:

But a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor's degree by PayScale Inc. shows that graduates in these subjects earned 103.5% and 97.8% more, respectively, about 10 years post-commencement.
It's always good to keep old code around. You never know when it'll be useful.

A while back (~2006-07) some developers wrote an H.264 encoder and submitted it to the ffmpeg project (code can be found at http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/h264/) as a native encoder under LGPL. However, the code never made it in for many reasons: it was very slow, very limited, and most importantly it reminded people of the Vorbis catastrophe a few years back, when ffmpeg added a very basic (and crappy) but functional Vorbis encoder and people began complaining because it was simply so bad that it was useless (and thus there was no point in having it at all). Nobody volunteered to bring the H.264 encoder code up to spec and make it useful, so it was never accepted.

A few days ago, I went back and read through the code and noticed a rather interesting idea involving their method of variable-length coding. So I took it, made it better, and adapted it to fit my project (x264). I'll probably commit it this week or next.

Good thing the old, "useless" code's still around, isn't it?

(That's actually one of the primary ways I get ideas for optimizations and improvements: look at other peoples' code and see if they have any good ideas.)
Web 2.0 Agile Requirements Management
I've seen - on this list or another - a link to an online requirements management tool... I believe based on Scrum/FDD or perhaps generic. Anyway, I've lost the link and searched far and wide and cannot for the life of me find this site again (which looked super-cool and very useful). Any ideas?

Have you seen this site?
HTTP Proxies are evil, and stupid. Good thing there are thousands of ISPs to choose from in the UK.

Shame https://www.wikipedia.org doesn't work.
The 5 second limit on request time has defeated me:
http://superjoesoftware.com/misc/tetrisbuster.cgi
http://pastebin.com/d347e754c
The table claims to be from a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor's degree.

I'm a bit biased, but in my experience philosophy majors tend to be pretty smart and philosophy degrees don't lend themselves to any particular career path. So I don't find it surprising that there's a big gap between where philosophy majors start and where they end up. And the initial number is probably especially skewed downward by lack of initial direction (I would have been ecstatic if my first job out of college paid $39k).
I honestly started feeling anxious just looking at all that clutter. I couldn't work there a week without a complete mental breakdown. At least the website reflects the office space.
Kim Rugg's alphabetized newspaper front pages
POTOtoo: Pirates of the Amazon as a Greasemonkey script
In Russia, when they were replacing public dial pay phones with pushbutton ones in '90s, they chose "Speedometer" type (I-C) for some of them. (Today most of them are replaced with proper ones, though.)

Another variation from Russia (III-A): http://www.tema.ru/travel/komsomolsk/IMG_8694.jpg

I-B is an interesting configuration - for churches :)
I recently found this forum and I am very happy I did.
It is nice to see a threads of discussion end in agreement.
That doesn't seem possible in many other places.
It's not my game, but once their site comes back up I'll send over your idea to them. Good idea. :)
So, it doesn’t matter that someone says really interesting things, it just matters that you’re friends with the prom-queen.

Noo.... what matters on Twitter is that the prom-queen is friends with you.
I think it has the potential to gain enough traction to make it to the XBox and PS3 network stores. A few of my friends already want to buy it.
You're looking for OAuth :) http://oauth.net/ - OAuth provides you with "valet keys" (the non technical term!) so that third party apps can go into other apps for you to do just what is necessary.

Twitter is looking to implement OAuth (supposedly they already have in some regard, but it's not in public use).
This won't be a popular opinion and I don't believe it myself, but in the interest of "what if" debate...

Perhaps this is a reasonable development. At the biological level, there's no direct need for a male gender beyond its ability to spread and mix genes. The chemicals specified - such as those from pesticides and PCBs - are the result of human technological improvement. Perhaps there's some biological reason to "switch off" the generation of diversity in species when humans reach a certain level of development? Now that one species has "won" the planet, perhaps having many multiple species and variations is a negative thing for future growth?

Again, I don't believe this myself, but biology has a funny way of doing stuff that we don't understand, and some of it has to have a logical reason (as we have seen in hindsight). This is the only logical rationale I can come up with myself - though I'm sure there are others.
couldn't you take for example K&R and a copy of Objective-C language spec to get going ? or are the semantic differences just too great...
Dunno - there is just one option to ship via UPS.. was surprised also; bit like using those cashpoints and then getting prompted for an extra 2 quid at the end only..err..quite a bit more.
I can't stand science fiction stories that strive to Hit you over the Head with a Message.
Interesting blog article. I can't wait to see the next post.

The concept of Tetris is pretty simple; many of guys here might have written some variation of it (I myself wrote one in Z80 assembler back in college to show my crude hand-made PC could be of some use :-) The "modern" Tetris has been evolved since then, though. I didn't realize that until I had a project with the official Tetris game. There are various rules that affect gameplay in subtle ways (have you heard of SuperRotation?). It is possible that somebody who is very good at the "good old" Tetris will not be good at the modern Tetris. I assume that's why the Tetris Company wants to define "The Tetris" to make sure people who play do play the same game. On what legal basis they do that, I don't know and that's why I'm curious where you'll go.
Obama Says Internet Key to Economic Recovery
The problem with abstractions like GWT is that they build a completely different and incompatible abstraction and on top of JavaScript. The benefit of extensions like packages, type checking and so on may be large, but the cost is also large because you have to abandon compatibility with existing code and libraries.

Mascara (http://ecmascript4.com/) is a different approach - it extends Javascript with classes, types, namespaces and so on, but it does it in a backwardly compatible manner, so you can still utilize your old code, use JQuery and so on.
My opinion:

We can't have enough S&E people:

Every scientist who discovers a new class of drugs requires ten* more to study all the derivatives.

Every engineer who creates a new machine allows ten* more to build machines that use this machine.

S&E create wealth. The other top-paying degrees -- law, business -- don't create wealth. They may allow the S&E to more efficiently create wealth, but they don't create wealth.

*Number made up, but it is certainly greater than zero
Is it okay to give a technology the name of a serial killer?
> The other top-paying degrees -- law, business -- don't create wealth. They may allow the S&E to more efficiently create wealth, but they don't create wealth.

Hence they create this difference in wealth...
Even for people strictly interested in Objective C, Apple does have their ref guide (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Ob...), and there is also a book not on cocoa but on objc the language called "Programming in Objective-C" by Kochan (which I do believe there's a second edition soon to go to print that would be a very good idea to wait for). I don't really think either one of them considered the reader to be a complete beginner or "retarded", although the former is probably more down-and-dirty with the language than the latter is, which is more of an introductory text. Who hasn't seen one of those for any language?

If you want a retarded cocoa book, check out the older Mac programming-related texts O'Reilly used to publish a few years ago. Out of print now I think, but man, they REALLY assumed you were a complete beginner. Not that that was a bad thing, but Hillegass is definitely miles better.
Largely true, not controversial, I'd say. The VCs I talked to are not in denial; but still value cash they're getting from their management fees. That phase will be over soon.
Question for Paul: what alternative investment vehicles will arise in the years to come? How about some smaller-scale buyout businesses?
You could just take K&R and an Objective-C guide and try, but the best somewhat-tailored advice about learning Objective-C and Cocoa that I have ever read was on http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa/2008/5/15/... and something I highly recommend people see before starting :)
What a great post Paul, thanks for this. we are workin hard with a new funding business model & service for web start-ups, see www.growvc.com

"What do you get when you break the traditional vc funding model and then restructure it with some social media & web 2.0 glue?”
The shipping fee just stopped me.

USD 171 = GBP 116

£116 to ship something from the USA to central London is an extremely bad deal. Next day before 9am UPS or Fedex would cost significantly less.

When I feel I'm being ripped off and taken for a mug, I get off the ride.
Nokia 2650 Lcd Display Lights Problem
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Free perhaps? (granted - it's a shoe - but it does re-think some of the standard shoe assumptions.

can't think of much else.
At least the dotcom bubble produced world class companies like Amazon and eBay and Google. The housing bubble leaves us with only foreign debt and unproductive granite countertops.
I think the blog post in general is slightly misleading, it seemed like the author was reading Cocoa books (i.e. hillegass and the pragprog cocoa programming book? that's the only pragprog book I can think of that would make sense, but it's only in beta...) and not strictly related to the language, which is what seemed to be what he was looking for.

I'm curious as to which texts this person has looked at, since I found Kochan's objc book, a friend's guide based on Kochan (http://otierney.net/objective-c.html although it hasn't been updated in a while), and the Apple docs on objc to be more than enough supplement to what I considered a chapter of Hillegass that left a little something more to be desired.
I wonder why he chose Mako as a template system as opposed to Jinja (django style). Looking at the Mako syntax.. it just doesn't make any sense.
Consider the request for more info seconded.
I'm trying to setup a website that will allow a small community to sell stuff to each other, but to make the whole thing viable I need to figure out a way to take a micro-payment from the seller at the time they upload their listing. I'm not too keen on the SMS model, the aggregate billing option is one that I might end up taking. Just thought that micro-payments would have been a solved issue by now and easy to implement.
I don't know. The people I follow on Twitter don't seem to use it in the "high school" way, and neither do I - I don't automatically follow someone just because they follow me. I might, if they're saying interesting or fun stuff; I'm not saying I only tweet nuggets of wisdom myself, but I do aim for some degree of quality.

I don't follow "influencial" people for the sake of it, I have my doubts that really helps. On the other hand, I've met some really cool people and also clients through it, which helped a lot, especially as I moved to Vienna knowing virtually nobody.

I have however found that I do need to keep my follow list in check, or the stream of information is overwhelming.
Python "Surpasses" Perl?
I never understood this one:

"Someone running a startup is always calculating in the back of their mind how much "runway" they have—how long they have till the money in the bank runs out and they either have to be profitable, raise more money, or go out of business."

Why go out of business? Okay, you're out of money and you're not profitable yet. Let people go and return back to square one. Two founders in the garage, but now you have a codebase, a beta version probably, a website and some connections in the industry. Yeah, tough times, but when I see people going out of business in such situation I always think that they were there for a VC-backed salary and some fun.
I really don't see how Pownce was in direct competition with Twitter. On the messaging side there certainly was competition and I can see that Twitter wins that battle, but Twitter doesn't do all the rest very well.
How do I send someone a song over Twitter? Upload it to rapidshare and send them a link, please. I always saw these services as complementary, though I never figured out how to perfectly balance my usage.
Any thoughts on the features that Pownce does better than Twitter?
Any sites that will replace Pownce? Utterli perhaps?
http://smtpd.develooper.com/
Devils advocate on the “VCs will die meme”
Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Etch
And a business guy who who handles the business end allows ten more engineers to build useful machines.

A natural extension of your logic: GvR or Stallman may allow S&E people to more efficiently create wealth, but he doesn't create wealth himself (Python, Emacs, etc are only tools to create other stuff)

The ability to create wealth is, itself, wealth.
Firefox 2.0 Users Beware of Phishing | TechJaws
I don't think the math supports your conspiracy theory. Website ads do not pay enough to support robo dialer + real phone calls + electricity + risk of getting sued.
JavaScript is pretty limited. It lacks features like packages, classes and so on. Brendan Eich, the inventer of JavaScript, have stated that the language was frozen prematurely due to political rather than technical reasons.

Luckily core JavaScript is also pretty flexible, which is what allows you to implement your own class system, package system and so on, on top of vanilla JavaScript. And this is basically what language abstractions like GWT, Cappuchino, Pajamas and so on does. They are basically a set op macros on top of JavaScript.

I just think they throw out the baby with the bathwater by implementing a different language on top of JavaScript rather than just extend and improve existing JavaScript in a backwardly compatible manner. This forces the language abstrations to create their own set of libraries, which will never be as good as the native JavaScript libraries. You get caught in a ghetto, and isolate yourself from the broader JS communkty.

My own approach is to embrace and extend JavaScript in a bachwardly compatible manner, such that you can still use the large amount of native JavaScript libraries. Ideally "language abstraction" should be orthogonal to library abstraction. I want a more powerful JavaScript, but I also want to keep using JQuery.
Nokia N70 N72 Keypad Ways Jumpers Problem
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Notice that Math shows a higher starting salary, and as much of a percent increase as philosophy.
Gvke - SAMPDORIA vs GENOA live Italy Serie A 7th December
Pre-steal this book
For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers
I agree with "Harrison Bergeron"'s message but Edison was a corrupt, greedy, egotistical, complete asshole. We would be much better off with less of his type and more of Tesla's type.
nice site, well executed
Is Science the Only Sure Path to Truth?
Russian Translation:

http://www.web30.ru/2008/12/07/mogut-li-venchurnye-kapitalis...
I am nearly sure that that a similar story was discussed on HN recently but I may be confusing it with another forum/social news site. anyway here's is a video that I watched as a result recently called the disappearing male: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7530701744597358451&...
Django templates are designed to be designer (non-programmer) friendly, becase of its CMS/newspaper origins.

Mako's goal is to create a powerful, programmer friendly and FAST templating language .

A lot many times having code in templates is a faster way to develop, especially if the presentation layer is mostly intended to be used by a programmer.

Also, you can write mako code which has good separation of concerns.

How is :
<% for r in rows %>
${r.name}
<% endfor %>

less readable than :

{% for r in rows %}
{{r.name}}
{% endfor %}
The OECD rankings look pretty clear to me:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7126388.stm
How I learnt to love Perl
I expect their bank balance is also somewhat more cluttered than yours, however.
With in_reply_to_status_id and proper client support, that should go away, hopefully.
The Design Review Ep 1: The iPhone and Firefox Mobile
Regarding the John Does in Apple's Amended Complaint Against Ersatz Mac Cloner Psystar
Insulting someone's sense of style or taste is not insightful or good commentary - just an ad hominem fallacy.
Someone who can't program already is "retarded"? No wonder certain geeks get a reputation for being unfriendly elitists. I thought we'd grown out of childish slurs like this.
It's online here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-175006468841636088