skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Then again, hackers usually need more machine than the low-end crap."

Microsoft did that. Look how well their OS runs on low-end hardware.

I don't do client side programming anymore and I am _very_ happy with my Atom-based netbook for work. When I get home, I just hook it up to a giant monitor and happy I go.

And, BTW, Zope and Django run acceptably on it, so, I won't be seen migrating to a backbreaker notebook anytime soon.

I find OSX somewhat uncomfortable to use for me (a lot less than Windows - boy, why do people subject themselves to that?) mostly because it's Unix to a point and something completely alien beyond that. The problem for developers is the Unix half is very traditional 80's Unix and things have evolved a lot since that was cutting edge. I like my package manager to help me reassemble my box the way I want it to be and do so in servers in a repeatable way.

If your hacking is only around programming and reading Office documents and you don't touch system configuration at all, the Mac can be for you. If not, I would consider a vanilla PC with Linux as the superior choice.
Wow, I started going through my threads (because I didn't take the time to read that there was a sorted karma link!) and I was surprised how damn much I've had to say since I started posting here. It was a bit of a walk back through time.
Isn't that roughly what tracemonkey does?

Yes. Nice to see implementations are growing up.

I guess it just seems much more elegant and simple to me to have only one kind of scope in the language... That's what's so awesomely simple about this language.

Block scope can be viewed as only one kind of scope. :-) If you try to define a language formally, function scope and lexical scope will be about equivalent on the simplicity scale: scopes will just be tied to code blocks instead of functions. (The scope nesting machinery is needed for closures anyway.) Implementation simplicity is also about equivalent: yes, blocks have to allocate activation frames only if they're needed, but same applies to functions once you get serious about speed.

The preference depends on your coding style. I find it intuitive to declare each variable in the outermost {} block that uses it, and not higher up; this intuition exactly corresponds to the formal concept of block scope. Many people naturally think like me, hence the huge number of Web articles complaining about the JS loop scope gotcha, calling it "weird", "unintuitive" and all manner of names. But as you say, to each his own.

A javascript engine would be crazy to try to shoehorn it into the language now, since it would, in fact, break a lot of code in the wild.

Yes. :-(
Does anyone know where in Europe they are hosted?
The joke is on the word "both", not on the "country and western". Pour one out for Jake and Elwood.
I like to think that even though it takes a long time and is often very hard, when governemnt finds that it is wrong, it can change its mind.

Governemnt is partly causing this problem. I'd like them to stop. This will require some action on their part.
What Bill Joy is worried/excited about [video]
I shuffle bits... the customer shuffles bits... the banks shuffle bits... and everybody's happy, as long as everyone's put the right bits in the right bins.
That's interesting. Reminds me of "the rubber room" in the New York educational system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/education/10education.html

Basically, unions have made it so difficult to fire or discipline teachers that the management resorts to a "reassignment center" where teachers while away months or even years. Very quickly, education professionals are reduced to fighting over the best chairs, just like jail.

I'm not sure what's worse. The "rubber room" is someplace you go involuntarily. The UAW created the Job Bank voluntarily.

I don't know if we can blame unions, exactly. Without them, management would have overwhelming power. But we need something else too -- a way of resolving differences that doesn't incent management or union leaders to plunder the organization.
"The emperors new clothes"

Don't mention the truth! Just smile, wave and say the clothes look lovely.
You can't conclude anything from such a small period taken in isolation.
Although clojure makes up for that.
"... A tortoise? What's that? ..."

'Do you make up these questions? Or do they write 'em down for you?' ~ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/quotes
Definitely straw-man, this is the first time I have heard about "heat deaths" as a reason to care about global warming. Personally I am more worried about people losing their place to live, and ensuing conflicts over territory.

I also doubt that using food as fuel for cars happens only as an anti-global-warming measure. I suspect since oil is expensive, people are looking for alternatives. Although there might be subsidies and carbon taxes messing with the price.

Hm, now I am at 10 minutes and he is still talking about heat deaths. Not interesting (<hits stop button>).
As far as well-respected schools with distance CS programs, I think it's between the Universities of Maryland and Illinois.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131047

Also try http://searchyc.com, this has been asked before
Plus it's based on ML, which, while possessing a few wrinkles and warts, is a very pragmatic language.
Is Your Program Greener or Longer?
Except that this isn't really quicksort, because it's not in-place. Let's see you write the real one; I bet you it will be uglier than the equivalent java code.
2008 global Zeitgeist
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it Joel, who suggested making daily reports in Excel with time spent and time estimated in hours for every task? Looks like his amnesia stretches further than he thinks )
"... since when did joel redesign his permalink pages? ..."

if you go back a bit they still look the same ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000077.html & http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html I do like the evolutionary design, but older articles miss out. The particular post reads like a fluffy advertisement without much substance. Luckily you can listen to the excellent StackOverflow podcasts ~ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/12/podcast-32/
That's the issue though... you don't need a dedicated server to serve 1m users, and you don't need to add web servers, load balancing, replicating etc etc

VPS servers are so cheap and more than enough.
The current web stacks are just ridiculously lousy.
Cloudfront has nodes in

# Amsterdam
# Dublin
# Frankfurt
# London

Possibly one of these is the location?
Is there any C++ code for this? There's something interesting I would like to try, but JS is not my beast. If there is none, I'll port, but perhaps someone already has written this in C or C++, saving me some trouble.
If the FSF says it's compatible, then I guess it is. My bad.
they must do something to that site. way too painful to read.
I preordered. The blog talks about it being available in various stores already, but I'm out in the middle of nowhere.
In case you haven't noticed, for the last several years there has been a totally irrational and even juvenile trashing of java in favour of fine languages such as haskell, erlang, ruby, python, etc.

I think it's a good thing: it reminds us that even in our corner of the woods, where reason is supposed to reign, we succumb to the most banal fashions. Hackers typically like to point out that "normal" people speak much nonsense and hold irrational views. In fact, the same is true for us. Well, except me, that is ;)
ignore this I upvoted by mistake, then flagged
Pegs: jQuery based differential scrolling demo
1) It's not my theory
2) Whilst it is true that individual genes do not have goals, it is not true that natural evolution, as a search algorithm, does not. When we talk about goals for GAs (which is of course the context of this very discussion we are having), we are specifically talking about high values of the fitness function of the GA. In the case of natural evolution, the 'goal' is to reproduce a gene as much as possible. Note, this is a goal of the GA, not of the gene, and the usage of the word here does not indicate an actually entity with a motivation, but simply reuses terminology that is quite common in discussion of search algorithms (evolution being but one example of these).
I totally agree. We learned Miranda, which is similar to Haskell. Had we learned Haskell and the lecturer had pointed us to its FFI (which is a real joy to use, similar in ease-of-use to the lisp FFIs -- much easier than the java JNI [although JNA goes a long way towards alleviating JNI pain]), things probably would have been very different.

I mean, the first real programming I did was with logo. Why was it fun? Because the it resulted in pretty pictures and animations. When I started programming pascal, C, and assembler, it was 320x200x256 graphics that made it fun (that and TSRs).

Programs need to do something to be exciting. Sorting lists and building trees is certainly interesting, but doesn't inspire that "I need to figure out how they did that" feeling that every programmer my age will have felt when he/she first saw Doom or Wolfenstein, or in my case, Strike Commander.
Yes - to keep track of the project and (over time) to factor in the programmer's error rate in estimating completion times.

No - not to measure programmer's time and attendance.

One is about project management - the other is about the dreaded "Human Resources" and that should not be encouraged.
Crossing a picket line is not the right way to take a principled stand against unions. If you don't like unions, then don't take a job in a union shop.

I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned the social consequences of the decision you are considering. If you cross the picket line you are a 'scab' and some of your colleagues, especially if they come from a working class background, will consider you to be a traitor.

The TA-like employees you work with probably do not resemble the stereotypical angry union truck driver or dock worker but some of them may come from countries where trade union organizers are routinely arrested, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.

Otherwise polite and reasonable people can take a lot of offense to a decision like this.
I started with Linux and some windows, went to Mac, and have gone back to Linux (with windows for gaming).

For you I'd recommend it. Everything is just that little bit easier and more consistent. You do seem to spend more money but I think it's worth it in time saved.

My main reason to avoid the mac is wanting to avoid lockin - I've decided to move as much of my computer use as possible over to open software and file formats with the goal of being able to retain my data for longer and use it in more ways. You can go a long way towards this goal on a mac, but it's not quite as natural as doing it on Linux.

For me, I got annoyed with Unix software not having quite as nice an experience on OS X as it does on Linux, but it doesn't sound like that'll be a problem for you.
I thought it is having lots of money that is sexy, not "finance".
I found OS X applications generally seem to have slightly fewer keyboard shortcuts than Linux/Windows.

They're there, but for example I think menus are easier to access on Windows (still possible on both though!).
"... Only podcast I'm regularly listening to is the Stack Overflow podcast ..."

SO is pretty good value. Try

- itconverstation (the best, varied) ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/

- guardian (light) ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/techweekly

- dan bricklan (quirky) ~ http://www.softwaregarden.com/podcast/dbsl.html

- dave winer (quirky) ~ http://www.morningcoffeenotes.com/

- oreilly week in review (light) ~ http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/12/the-best-of-oreilly---n...

- Microsoft Ch9 (software) ~ http://channel9.msdn.com/Media/Podcasts/
I can't stand them myself. But other people I work with use them more regularly than me and seem to love them.

No proof of anything, but possibly more useful data.
Transactional Memory
A great reason to go OpenSolaris!

And seriously, (IMHO) it's actually pretty good.
Yeah, me too, they keep apologizing for the delay.
Not sure how RightAWS was missed from this post. It's well maintained by the guys at RightScale with support for EC2, S3, SQS, and SDB. I've found it to be the most well maintained for working with SDB.
http://rightaws.rubyforge.org/

ActiveRecord2SDB is also worth checking out - it's built on top of RightAWS:
http://activrecord2sdb.rubyforge.org
I think the climatologists are capable of including natural cycles into their calculations. Global warming is not about absolute warming every year, it is about deviations from the expected temperatures.

Since it is only a couple of degrees, it is unlikely that an individual would even notice it. Would you notice if one year is on average one degree warmer than the previous one? There have always been variations (cold winters and warm winters, rainy summers, etc.). These natural variations are already taken into account.
No mac user's going to argue that Apple's got good selection in hardware :-) If what they've got fits your needs, you're good. Otherwise...
"... How do you explain what you do to Foo? ..."

not something I've really thought of much... but at the supermarket early this morning it went something like this:

ME "Everyone is very cheery here?" (referring to singing employee - who sings at 7?)

CHECKOUT "Yes, she is quite happy always smiling."

ME "So they don't employ grumpy people? or are they just all cheery?"

CHECKOUT "No, they are all pretty happy?"

ME "Oh, I thought they would be tired (just after 7am and I'm dead tired) and grumpy" (I'm tired, I'd be grumpy)

CHECKOUT "So what do you do?"

ME "I write ...."

CHECKOUT "Ohhh (surprised)"

ME "... software."

CHECKOUT "Ah you're one of those 'computer nerds'?"

ME "Yeah... something like that."

CHECKOUT "That's a compliment you know."

I should have just left it at writing.
> Living in a "brown" community doesn't help either, where every other parent is a doctor.

Am I the only one that read this 3 times trying to understand its meaning?
I always thought "over-leveraged" was a really sexy term, myself.
Don't whine, you're lucky. My grandmothers didn't like me to start with and now they're all dead.
Really? which ones? I had heard differently.
Better off without Yahoo! So, you just got laid off from the struggling portal. Congratulations

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/09/yahoo-layoffs-workers-tech-...
You're right.

Just saying "I do x." is a like hitting a conversational brick wall. "I am a(n) x." is even worse.

People need a story or a hook to keep paying attention.
When I first started my job (where I am now) they put on a Mac. My biggest pet peeve as a developer was having to use a keyboard shortcut to get # instead of being able to press 1 key. (There were other keyboard issues too, but these were specific to me as a UK-er; can expand if necessary.)

If you're already using the mac os in a VM, I don't see the learning curve/adjustment period as being THAT big.
The Europe zone is still not in the output from ec2-describe-availability-zones so it's not available quite yet.
Eurasia.

What?
"Just remember: The camp that says there's no reason to go Mac over Linux are just as bad as the one that says there's nothing better than Mac. Choose whichever one suits your purposes better."

Well put. Now convince the hardcore fanboys to take that approach! ;)
Ask HN: How to Building a first look website for stake holders?
Are there easy alternatives to build a first look website for stake holders?
I have an idea for a hardware product and want to proof the concept, that it can earn money. This means for me going to retailers and ask them what they think about it, if they the would bye/sell it, etc. At the moment there is not a finished product, there is only the idea.
I don't want to build a whole website for that, because I am limited with time. What prebuild solution I could use instead? Please share your thoughts.
Rockin' regards,
Marco
The developer G1 lets you flash it however you want. Is that sufficient freedom? I don't understand how this view gets upmodded.
Now that's a quality question that demands critical thinking.
As celoyd said, it only takes a few minutes to learn the handful of rules. It's just a matter of finding time to play.
Can you give me a source for the hardware not having drivers? That makes no sense to me, how are you supposed to be able to reflash a phone in any meaningful sense without drivers so the phone, er, works.
Angel Medical Flight Provides Elite Air Ambulance
Angel MedFlight has legal counsel on staff to ensure that Insurance Companies are making ethical decisions on patient claims. They are able to obtain payments on claims that other air medical transportation company would not be able to execute.
Hm, so I guess the answer is mostly no. =/

The biggest site on there is wego.com. Great site, and I think they open sourced much of their Rails CouchDB integration. But only 30k unique visits per month.
Why not make the change on Wikipedia?
I am also a comfortable Windows user. I was 'forced' on to a Mac when I started my current job and had quite a few difficulties (although some were related to the fact that, as a UK-er, I'm used to a traditional British English keyboard layout). Although I stuck it out for several months, I still found myself LESS productive than I was on Windows (or Linux) and my boss bought me a new Dell.

Although this was just my experience, and you may very likely differ, I thought you may benefit from the experience of a fellow Windows user. Don't believe everything you hear about how working on a Mac will suddenly make you 10 times more efficient.

This old comment of mine on another post expands on the things I found annoying/difficult:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=337842
> You'll also notice that you're a crap-ton more productive.

It's not a given that using a Mac will make you more productive.
nod. braintree are tools if you're not a big player.
I tried it. Never works. ;)

I think family wants to see you secure. I think future spouses want to see a willingness to take on risk. So tailor those pick up lines to the audience.

(Wonder if startups got less sexy with the economy going down...)
At the end of the talk he cites a list of top Economists 'Best bang for you buck.'

Anyone know any more about that? A link would be appreciated.
John Buckman: Love Entrepreneurship Your Own Way
So are you suggesting that trends mean global temperatures should be obvious to any casual observer or that the technicalities of policy decisions should be?
There's a couple interesting things here.

One is the obvious debate about timesheets, which most comments (so far) seem to focus on. Personally, I'm of Joel's school of thought on this one--my ex-co-founder insisted upon twisting FogBugz into a time-tracking tool, with all of the negative results that Joel predicts.

But for me, the more interesting point is Joel's apparent uncomfortability with his role as a pundit-- recently he's attacked Gladwell's use of anecdotes (while pointing out his own culpability in this department), and now he adds another entry to his ongoing file on what a clueless boss he sometimes is. Is this self-examination somehow related to his relationship with Atwood?
The things I do to my relatives are so awful, I can't ever explain, no matter how many times you ask.
I thought the joke was on the word "music"..
Free Great Advice and Listing of Holiday Gifts.
How can he not mention the significant threats posed by climate change and only mention polar bears and heat-wave deaths? What about the collapse of the Gulf Stream? What about the world's major cities and low lying countries being submerged in water? etc etc

If climate change only amounted to the things he mentioned, I'd say pollute away but it has the potential for a genuine global catastrophe.

Also where does he get his amazingly precise figures from and why does he keep mentioning Al Gore?
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a lady at the bank once.

Lady: "What do you do, then?"

Me: "I'm a web developer"

Lady: "Oh, so a web designer!"

Me: "Er, close, I'm a web developer - I make designs work"

Lady: "Oh, I get it! So like in Microsoft Word?"

Me: "..."

Thankfully, the majority of my family are computer literate and don't require babying over the subject.
Schrodingers cat by John Gribben. Check his other books as well if you want good explanations of physics
We have been waiting for this for over a year! Hooray amazon!
> I thought the Vista bashing was just "It's different and I don't like it!" kind of bashing that all new versions of software get

This is an entirely sensible criticism. New software shouldn't do things differently for gratuitous and arbitrary reasons. It should only change things if there's a good reason to. Car manufacturers don't say "it's boring that all cars have for years done the brake and accelerator pedals this way, let's be new and innovative and do it the other way round!"
I just went to slimtimer. They are obviously trying to get businesses as customers. Their opening line:
All your timesheets are belong to us.
(it does rotate)

I agree, it's funny, but see you later!
RIL, audio, wifi and accelerometer, to name a few. Additionaly, the entire radio stack is also closed source (it is outside the OS - it runs on separate CPU, is stored separately in ROM and RIL communicates with it using shared memory).
Search the Web with Protection | TechJaws
The complicating factor, of course, is all those former first rounders but second stringers, have had significant money invested in them. It's a lot easier to cut the lower picked players but not necessarily because of their "talent".

Matt Cassell = perfect example.

Does he even get a chance on any other team? Ever?
I dunno, it's more like I've fallen off the end of the world. Previously I was a corporate consultant, so I did incomprehensible things but I worked for a large company so it must make sense. Now I do incomprehensible things but not only that I do them in an incomprehensible way, and I'm enjoying it, it must be evil somehow (irish catholic background), but I'll take on the many suggestions here and try them out.
I call BS on Albert.
In Leopard they introduced reflections and the blue dots to the dock... Both eye candy over the old rev in my view...
No, I'm with you. But that guy really is screwed @ the family table!

Dumping med school? Man, that's like me quitting teaching college. People thought (still think, probably) that I'm nuts. Occasionally I think they may be right...
It's also great to know that success does not require a fancy looking website. My eyes hurt
It's still very early days. If you want do do a very large production setup of CouchDB, you will be sitting on the bleeding edge of community experience. That's not for everyone, of course.
I really wish all my relatives read "Founders at Work" and understand the people who start-up better. I get ridiculed for working in the night and sleeping till noon and i get compared with owls and dogs for that but i always think of myself as Batman when i work all night.
I took small planet to mean dwarf planet.
Well lucky for us all he wasn't publishing in his grandmother's journal. If having powerful expressive models isn't "understanding" then maybe it's best we leave this concept to message boards.
I've been a Java developer for years and I don't think its trashing is irrational. Once you have seen alternative ways of doing things, going back to Java is simply painful.