skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, we tend to suck at sports because we're shorter in stature and we're slower at building certain muscles. I would know. We have like what, 50 guys on my school's cross country team. 40 are Asian, but 5/10 of the caucasian guys to the best out of the 50. They get injured less, even if they aren't as good early on for some strange reason. They also improve faster.

Though you have to admit, with all that video game playing, it's no small wonder that asians are pretty decent at baseball.
Google Nemesis
Google Nemesis is the real deal, complete with clear directions in a straightforward step-by-step format, so you can just plug it and play? Wow, Google Nemesis is totally dummy proof..
Acquisition Dance Between Facebook And Twitter Over For Now?
Your point is valid, and I wish I could give you an extra vote for coining(?) the word "Fad-driven development".
If you think 4 8 5 3 9 7 6 (Which I think was the string) is hard to remember at a glance, Try:

FDC2:D343:5602:32:213:50FF:FE01:3842

I'd love to know what the cognitive impact of IPv6 has been on our ability to remember long strings of numbers.
Keyboardr.com: quicksilver in a web page
You wouldn't need to refresh many times a day if twitter was able to scale enough to send updates via XMPP (like friendfeed does, natch). Rather than a different tab, it should be interested with gtalk/chatting in the gmail interface.
ok here's a more usual situation in which the programmer is blindly using their favorite bracketing style, and come across the issue...

function getObject()

{

return // returns undefined, not the object.

{

age: 30,

name: "axod"

}

}

Personally I hate that style of bracketing, but some swear by it.
I ripped you - http://flippingmania.blogspot.com/
lol
JavaScript syntax lets you write statements over multiple lines - if the first line cannot be parsed correctly it assumes you meant to continue over to the second line. This leads to odd error messages and JavaScript being harder to debug without semicolons.

Note that this is different to, say, Python, where newline explicitly indicates termination of a statement.
Memorabilia Collection Tips
Are you a movie memorabilia fanatic? Are you aware how important your hobby is to the world of movies? Not many memorabilia collectors are aware of their contribution to the world of movies and its history. By collecting and preserving movie memorabilia, every collector preserves a valuable portion of the history at their own expenses and efforts. Movie legends continue to live among us through these movie memorabilia including celebrity photos, autographed movie posters, poster reproductions
Etymology: One
Google has the know how (XMPP), the significant user base (every Gmail user), and the relationship (who talks to who) information to do this themselves. Heck, they just need to start logging GTalk status messages.
Fixed-point combinators in Javascript: Memoizing recursive functions
Calgary Events Calendar
ThisCity.com is the most comprehensive guide to events in Calgary, Calgary events, and the Calgary events calendar.
Looks cooler than fliptitle :)
Newton - the first robo pet
Well they already own a Twitter clone Jaiku and are doing nothing with it.

With Twitter they'd be buying the users and the brand. Google is a better fit then Facebook, IMHO!
Google penalizes Video Bloggers for Keyword Stuffing | On.eTi.me
Yeah, not really my favourite bracketing style either. Good example though - it is conceivable that this could happen.
Darcs!

I mean mercurial!

No, git!

(Aww, these computer science problems are so hard!)
Inconsistent ActiveState
Well, Python will let certain statements continue over multiple lines as well, e.g.

someFunction(parameterOne,
parameterTwo)

I think maybe the difference is that Python has always treated newlines the way it does now. JavaScript, on the other hand, has developed idioms based on the semicolon model. So has the rug has been snatched out from underneith its users by suddenly making them optional? Does the change make a lot of useful idioms harder to implement?
Before anyone gets any ideas and as the article mentions: This is now fixed in the iPhone 2.2 software update.
The Social Graph, and why rel=”me” is doomed to failure
Kumo? C'mon, Microsoft
That's a hell of a thing for the 80's. An XT finding its own charging station with a homing beacon? Piping 1200 baud over a wireless phone link? Damn that's some fine hacking. Anyone know how many were actually sold and what the cost was?

Is it bad that I actually want one to rip the XT out of and put an EeePC in? I don't often find myself wishing for 80s technology!

Edit: Here's some googlage.

http://www.megadroid.com/Robots/newton.htm
Their bzr v. Mercurial comparison is a bit disingenuous at points, if not outright misleading.

Firstly, having used bzr 1.8 and 1.9, and Mercurial 1.0 and 1.1, the claim that bzr's speed is close to Mercurial's is downright hilarious. There simply is no comparison. bzr's speed is so atrocious that, when Python was looking at using bzr for its version control system, the only technique that bzr's fanboys could come up with to ensure fast checkout was to have you download a tarball of the pre-checked-out sources. You can see more at http://www.python.org/dev/bazaar/ . Conversely, I routinely work with Python-sized repositories in Mercurial without incident. If you have one take-away, this should be it.

They also claim that bzr can swap out its backend and hg can't (patently false--the backend has in fact changed for 1.1, due out very soon; see http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/fncacheRepoF...); that Mercurial cannot be served over vanilla HTTP (it can); that Mercurial does not let you change your merge algorithm easily (it does, see http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MergeToolCon...); that Launchpad, which even you admit is mediocre, is Mercurial-only, without noting that Mercurial has http://bitbucket.org and similar sites; and so on.

There actually are a few advantages of bzr over hg. That site just happens to make most of them up.
Woooo for being in the minority. I'm a rare ENFJ in the developer community.
Infrastructure 2.0: The Diseconomy of Scale Virus
Ask HN: why not just use Eclipse?
Having been a Java developer for years, I now really can't stand the language anymore. While trying other languages, I also attempted to move away from Eclipse. What I was looking for is something that can be more easily extended than Eclipse.

For example, the Rails plugins for Eclipse I have seen were really crap. Basically, they provided a dropdown menu for the rails generator scripts - big deal. I would like to create something that is a little bit more context sensitive, for example it could at least offer command line completion for the rails generator scripts (so if one generates a migration, you don't have to look up the column types in a book).

I have now tried vim for a while, but find that I only use the basic functionality because I am too lazy to look up how things work all the time. Right now I lost patience when I couldn't edit two files in two windows, and I simply switched to gedit for the time being. I have been an Emacs user for years, but also never really liked it - mostly because of the way it handles multiple windows and buffers.

I would consider switching to gedit, it seems nice and easily scriptable (Python), but I don't like that it is not cross platform (I presume it isn't). If I invest in learning a dev environment, I would like to have it available on Unix, Windows and OS X.

Ultimately, I wonder if Eclipse is really so bad? Why waste time configuring those "basic" editors to feature something remotely offering the tools of eclipse? By this I mean among other things integration into versioning tools (subclipse - haven't looked into git yet), bug trackers (Mylin - trac), and also structural navigation of code. For example I was working on a javascript game and really would have liked to be able to jump to functions by clicking on them, and Eclipse provides that. Maybe vim can be made to do it (ctags or whatever they are called?), but to get it to do it would be a major effort involving hours of googling for tutorials. And most likely, it would still not be as nice...

What are your thoughts? What would you recommend?
Best Buy Credit Card
An informative and detailed review of the Best Buy Credit Card
I like Vim, so I use Netbeans with the jVi plugin when I need an IDE.
I would use Eclipse because of its more extensive language support, but there are no decent plugins that offer vi style navigation AND code-completion.
The Market Meltdown & The Question of Trust
I highly recommend you use JSlint to pick up on things such as forgotten semi-colons to improve the quality of your code.
Can you really Rent a Coder?
Final judgment: SCO owes Novell millions
Internet Underground - Organized and Rich | TechJaws
I think his point, however, was that even an exclusive English speaker can communicate (in writing) arithmetic calculations without involving English. You don't have to 'mentally say' anything in English, so the inefficiency is mitigated.
Utimately it does, if it is concrete, 6ft high and has a locked gate in the middle.
Noise Cancelling (A note from JRuby Camp)
[slideshow] Max Burnet's massive computer collection inc. the first Unix PDP-7
I work for the fiber-optics division of a multinational electronic/optical connector firm. We're very interested in solid-state lighting as an area for near-term strategic investment. I'm currently monitoring several startups in this area and will add yours to the list. Good luck with your pitch at StartUpCamp Montreal!
Credit Crunch presenting more business.
Co-founder or employee?
I'm working on a startup which connects customers to providers. The site is aimed at a specific niche.

Everything is sort of planned/worked out. I'm already in the coding stage. For this I could use some help (I suppose), but I'll probably will be able to manage by myself.

I told a friend of mine (who is a great coder) the concept and the mockups and he thinks it's a great idea. Even more, he wants to help as a co-founder.
The code written for the site will be of higher quality and less 'hacked together' than when I would do it alone.

This is the dilemma: I don't want to split 50/50 just yet. However, I would like his input. I'm able to pay him for a bit of work, on the difficult parts of the site.
Also an option would be to pay him a lower salary upfront and a small portion of shares if the site takes off.

What would you do in a situation like this? Or have you been already involved in this scenario? For who have already 'startupped', is it possible to pull it off as a one-man show, or am I stupid to even consider this?
I think Hacker News needs "voting-down" functionality.
My Job Interview at Google
Surely Blaine Cook didn't want to give up the admin account he had access to. ;)
I generally avoid IDE's fulle stop - and I find eclipse to be a complete pain to work with :(

I work in Python, PHP, C++, Perl and Html (if that last one counts ;)) so I find that a text editor (NP++ - win32 only sadly - is my current fav) and a LAMP/Py server setup work well.

It costs more in setup time but I find it makes working faster in the long run :D

(although I know for RoR/Rails it would be a bit more difficult to take this approach)
ActiveState Komodo does it for me. Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac.
I wrote a genetic programming system in python. http://paraschopra.com/sourcecode/GP/GP.zip
For Detroit, Chapter 11 Would Be the Final Chapter
When I click something on the top nav, the top nav goes away, so I can't pick something else. That's bad.
But what is the pain with Eclipse? My reason for avoiding it was to get out of the mindset that all coding is complicated and can only be accomplished with the aid of an IDE. Certainly true for Java development, which would be impossible to handle without code completion, code generators and special navigation tools for the massive amount of files required.

However, some things an IDE offer are simply nice and useful, what is the point in not using them? Maybe IDEs really are a step in the evolution of software development?
should have been http://del.icio.us/ap9 ... not sure how I screwed that up.
Whichever way you go make sure you write out and sign an agreement your both happy with that sets out what each person is supposed to do, who the work belongs to, and what rewards/position/monies each person would be entitled to (and so on).

Check it with a lawyer, sign it and then leave it with the lawyer.

The guy might be a friend but it helps stops disputes occuring in the future :D (i.e. you both know where you stand).

EDIT: have you already formed the company or not? I couldn't quite make that out.
This is neat/novel.

My oldest known running code is about 6 years old. A ticket system I wrote as a stop-gap solution for an ISP until they could "find something better" has been running since 2002. In that time, it's handled over 100,000 cases, provisioned thousands of IP addresses (based on order details finds the best subnet out of a /19), and handled various scheduler tasks (via group and personal cals).

A few thousand lines of perl on a decent server can quite amaze you at times :)
Samsung demos amazing folding screen phone
Well (as an example) using the PHP module importing or creating a project was a complete pain (it's not simple or logical to me).

I also found it slow (expecially to close down).

I just had a lot of pain with it (quite a while ago now - hence not really rememebering the specific issues :) sorry).

I like the concept of IDE's - but I've never seen one that works really well. Eclipse always just felt bloated to me :(

As for advanced features you mentioned: a lot of text editors (I dont know about for Java but certainly for the languages i use) have code completion (which IMO would be the most important of the 3 things you mention).
Thanks for your reply.

No, I haven't formed a new company yet. I do have a business permit for my one-man company.
Yes, it's possible. But you need the right personality for it, e.g. a lot of self-motivation and critical thinking.

Most people, even most entrepreneurs, don't have the right personality for it. And so it gets a bad rap. But if you do, you can clearly make more money in the long run by not giving up as much equity.
Wow. It's amazing to find people who still write code in a text editor. It really says something about the sad state of IDEs for most languages.

I understand that many people from the PHP, Ruby, Python, and to a certain extent, Java communities may have never seen a really good IDE such as VS.NET in action, and are therefore simply ignorant. I would guess that Eclipse has a lot to do with it too, since so many people use it as their definition of a benchmark IDE, even when it's at least one generation behind the state of the art.

At the end of the day, code is not text. It has complex relationships that can be exploited to aid your productivity. A good IDE that's continually compiling in the background is truly an amazing thing to behold.
Welcome to the real world, where "the next programmer to work on this might be dumber than you" is considered a valid justification for cargo-cult programming.

Yes, I am a little surprised that some of the responses have assumed that because I'm questioning the usefulness of a syntactic element, I'm not interested in code quality or consistency. Quite the reverse: I'm very interested in producing code that is as clean as possible. What I've been trying to discover is whether the semicolon is a vestigial element that can now be left behind.

But the concensus seems to be that there is still a present need for semicolons, at least when it comes to interpreted JavaScript (though I'm still not convinced that the same holds for always-compiled variants like ActionScript). And like you say, current tools expect - quite reasonably - a certain coding style, even if they should use the full set of inferencing rules.
Put a little more on the front page. Either a one sentence (with a link to more) or an actual picture example of what it is.
Oh, right, I forgot. TortioseHg is a clincher if you want distributed VCS for Windows users. It makes things very easy.
He seems pretty excited for not getting the job.
IMHO nothing comes close to IntelliJ. Whether it be Java, Grails, or Rails. It's a pleasure to use. I did a stint of using Textmate (which is a brilliant texteditor), but just lacks the refactoring tools that IntelliJ provides.
From my (admitedly limited) web frameworks experience (django, grails and catayst), catalyst indeed shines by the extreme level of freedom in the choice it leaves up to you. If you're willing to invest the time necessary, it is indeed a great way to get separation of concerns without commiting to a specific way of programming your webapps. If you're used to glueing together modules in your apps, you should fit right in.
You are starting a business, and in many ways this guy has the ability to positively or negative affect the outcome of your business.

You need to assess, whether on your own or through conversations with him, where he fits into the grand scheme of things.

Employees carry out orders and implement code to a product spec

Co-Founders contribute business and product knowledge and opinion, on top of their "employee" duties.

Anything and everything is possible. Successful startups (like the previous fuckedcompany.com) have been built with just 1 guy acting as CEO, Janitor and Chief Coder. Others have been built with 1 founder and a few employees, and others with 2,3,4 or more co-founders.

At some point you'll probably want a co-founder. Both to bounce ideas off of and to give credibility to the overall business. While you're in the garage/basement phase this is not usually your prime concern. It's good to let things just "happen" for a little while until you find your ultimate direction.

For your specific case, given the limited details here, I would probably pay your friend a fair rate to act as a consultant advisor/coder. See what develops and if you feel he is of co-founder quality for this specific project. Like anything there is a tradeoff, and the tradeoff here is that if you later decide to make him an official co-founder, it will have come at the expense of his consulting salary.
I try to control my penchant for correcting grammar and spelling on the internet, but "insurance premia" demolished my self-control. A good name for an ED drug, perhaps, but not the plural of "premium" - that would be "premiums."
Posterous (YC Summer 08) launches search for every Posterous blog
Obama's Clinton Problem: Deregulation made the prosperity of the 1990s possible.
Don't be Jimbo Wales. If you really want/need his help for the "difficult parts of the site", then treat him fairly and make him a co-founder.
rel="me" isn't going to vanish. They would just get better with better services.

So why is requiring reciprocation a problem?

This isn't a problem either. Why take a pessimistic peep into everything? What if Simon Wilson likes to show off his other profiles? When X is on twitter and has a blog too, then X would like to show off his blog on Twitter and hence link to that too(or maybe not). Once a good number of frequently used services add XFN or FOAF support(a lot do), it would be easier for other smaller services to connect the users and their friends thru this link relationship. This might not be useful for the 'common' or 'average' users the author mentions but would be a gold mine for developers to make use of.
A second person in a startup adds hugely to the equation - That's why Ycombinator generally requires 2 or more founders. The ability to bounce ideas off each other just adds greatly to the equation. There's no reason a split has to be 50/50, and paying a small salary and a small portion of shares is a good option. But, from past experience, and echoing what others have said, see a lawyer, and furthermore, insist that your co-founder see a different lawyer.
Life goes on, why should I worry!
Microsoft Windows Small Business Calendar Server 2008 - SharePoint Live Edition
I'm not sure, but this sounds like something from "Mostly Harmless," which was the HHGTTG novel I only read once. That novel had a side plot about Arthur's "immortality" and how his choices impacted a character that was introduced in "Life, The Universe, and Everything."
JavaScript can just as easily attain this way of using named parameters:

win = Window.new({title: "A new window",
foreground: Red,
background: White,
menuBar: [fileMenu, viewMenu, helpMenu]});
The dot notation itself indicates continuation:

win = new Window().
setTitle("A new window").
setForeground(Red).
setBackground(White).
setMenuBar(fileMenu, viewMenu, helpMenu);
Gvke - Inter Milan vs Panathinaikos Athens Live
Wouldn't it make sense to kind of decide what you want, in English, and then go to the same lawyer to get help drafting it, and thinking of any details that need taking care of? Going to two lawyers sounds like a good way for the two lawyers to go back and forth for a while, driving up the price quite a bit.
Making them optional in javascript was a ridiculous idea.

But since they are optional now, using them throughout our code won't help us for the example above: it would still wrongly return undefined because of the implied statement end. So it could be argued that semicolons provide a false sense of security in this new, semicolon-optional world. :^)
RWW web predictions for 2008: 335 days later, hardly anything comes true
Jerry Yang - Slugworth to Google's Willy Wonka
So why do you think you didn't get the job?
You will be misunderstood
> am I stupid to even consider this?

I think few months down the line you would feel stupid yourself for not having got him as a cofounder. Launch it together, aim for a higher value such that your 50% means more than the 100% you would own otherwise.
Yieldex Wins Amazon AWS Start-up Challenge, Woos Former AOL Exec
Major Depressive Disorder or Normal Sadness?
I think sometimes even the very well qualified (and Peter should be) do not survive the interview grind.

Would be simply silly if that off by one error was the cause for rejection.
I asked a few people in Second Life how Ginko worked about a year ago and no one had any idea. Between that and the fact that there is no kind of deposit insurance mechanism, I wasn't going to touch one of those terminals.
Jaiku is a good example of why we should all hope Google does not buy Twitter.

The 'assimilation' time into the Google borg would kill the service (or give Arrington a years worth of bitching material)
I hear ya. Perhaps you should just tone down the exclamation points, though. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Elaine used too many exclamation points in the manuscript she was editing.
My problem with bagels is they have an appearance of being basically healthy, like wraps, whereas they've actually as many refined carbs as equivalent-sized donuts! Anyone who is even vaguely health-conscious should be avoiding them like the plague.
The "I got interviewed by Google" articles are getting old for me. I just don't care, and their process isn't that interesting anymore.
Unpossible! I'M the last good member to join ;) But seriously, Matt is right. This sort of complaining happens to every community. The issue with HN is the 'audience' isn't the type that makes people a ton of money like Digg or Reddit. We're all pretty focused on only a few things here, and unless YC makes a play for the larger market it will stay that way.
Ok, that makes sense to me I was always wondering if it was a perfect foresight problem, which it seems to be rather than a lack of services from Amazon. However, is it possible to get to the point of scalability where it is just a hardware issue rather than a restructuring of code issue? Or are the code methods one would implement to allow such scalability overkill in the early stages?
This is probably just interview #9 - seeing if he'll break NDA or trash talk Google after finding out he didn't get the job. You have to know how your employees will handle stress and frustration. ;)
Did you find the 'your highlighted pages' link? Sounds like what you want.
No idea, pal.