skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think more than a few of us start typing so early that it's hard to separate the two.

OTOH, I find that the kinds of pen & paper I use have a significant effect on the quality of my handwriting.
It always sucked.
The FED is not a gov't entity so the laws might be slightly different in this case.
actually there is...just look at the flags

China flag:
http://www.worldclassflags.com/productimages/cf_china_rep.gi...

USSR flag:
http://www.worldclassflags.com/productimages/cf_ussr.gif

Vietnam flag:
http://www.worldclassflags.com/productimages/cf_vietnam.gif
there are a few that are contributing to the startup ecosystem here, it's not as bad as your lament.
As a multi language user I prefer the python style for the following reasons:

- It is easier on the eye, especially when somone else has to read through & understand it

- I find it quicker to code

That said there are some aspects where C-style is superior - so a combination of the 2 might work well! Invent your own "mash up" style (as long as it is not too confusing).
I was in that same position about a year ago. On a whim, I decided I'd try one of those split keyboards and it helped enormously. I hated it for about a week (typos), but then I adjusted and the pain is gone.
> My other concern with this is that if the tarsnap server ever goes away, customers risk losing their data, since the server maintains the mapping of S3 objects to blobs. That's worrying. Assurances are not mechanisms.

Agreed. I use duplicity instead, which is a Free program that is similar to tarsnap. It backs up to S3, but uses many fewer PUTs (since archives are several megabytes).

Anyway, a full backup of my homedir (minus music) costs me about $1.40 a month to store (with incremental backups every night). A small price to pay knowing that if my laptop blows up, I can be right back where I started in just a few hours. (Or if I delete a file accidentally, it is back in seconds.)

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
One or two links to an old post would not deteriorate the quality or freshness of content. In fact a lot of times one might be interested to get broader idea of the author stream of thoughts, for the ones not interested thye just have to blind to hyperlinks.

May be it would become restructured content if there are too many outward references like the... "Undergraduate" post. But even that when you look into this post the hyperlinks are for keywords like "essays", "hacker", "computer science", what you "love", hack a "blub" on windows ..
Just out of curiosity, why such small blocks?
Call me:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ira+roth+new+jersey&hl=en...
My handwriting was always bad, and deserved to suffer. :P
Something like

if tyrant:
divide(); conquer()

is possible. Mixing curly braces with Python-style though wouldn't be very nice, I think.
Firms Make a Killing on i-Phone Apps
Interesting. I might look into that thx.

Although the major sourceo f my problem comes from using a laptop on my knees.. so :(
Yes, it's such a great book that I feel compelled to order the new one, despite the fact that Cialdini appears to have farmed out the writing to others and to have descended into self-parody in the video on that Amazon page.
Oh yeh I didnt mean that at all.

Indentation-as-a-divider is definitely easer on the eye than curly braces. But C-stlye has some handy bits and pieces to pick up (expecially on the OOP side of things - and also in the type-setting; though that has improved in python)
Bloomberg is suing to get the information, BTW.

They're one of a handful of news org's I still put value in.
Not really, I've always had terrible handwriting. Never had the patience to do all the silly writing exercises back in grade 1 :p

On the other hand, I do all my brainstorming and to-do lists on paper (and occasionally whiteboard), so I don't think I'll ever be completely out of practice.
Gotta love that Pilot G2
how about take a page from haskell style syntax, which allows both inferring the block structure from indentation, but also always it to be explicitly denoted at well?
My handwriting was always pretty bad and erratic; no doubt because I spent most of my time at a keyboard. But a couple years ago I decided to basically engineer myself a style of handwriting, first designing an alphabet, then training myself to use it (and only it). That project has grown to something of a full-fledged writing system. I would recommend to any geeks that they take a couple weeks to work out something for themselves and then try to learn it. It's been quite satisfying.
If you haven't already, take a look at Haskell syntax. It allows mixing indentation with braces. Parsing it is a bit harder of course, but I feel it really does provide the best of both worlds.
In your words what does this graph imply ? I would be great if PG himself can see something through this and respond.

My take:
- The most referenced (high in-links) posts are more dear to PG or most popular/strong in his line of thought.

- The ones with high outgoing links at times might mean they are restructured thought as 'markessien' noted.

- For a personal blog like PG's does higher interlinking reduce readability or make the content richer ? I guess the reader chooses this.
I really like Python's style.

Multi-line lambdas aren't such a must-have. You can always use named functions. So, Python's syntax doesn't mean you can't do something, just that you have to give it a name if it's going to be multi-line rather than being anonymous. Plus, if you really care that much, just make multi-line lambdas an exception. Heck, look through the proposals people have made for Python to have multi-line lambdas. You can make multi-line lambdas that really fit with the Python syntax (in my opinion).

So, don't make lambda the deciding factor between Python and C syntax.
Josh Marshall makes an interesting point:

put me down as suspicious [...] that the difference between Madoff's and the other investment implosions we've seen over recent months will turn out to be so clearly one of kind rather than degree.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/248051.php

It's only because Madoff made such blunt descriptions of his own scam that he's being covered as a crook. Had he done the more usual thing and insisted on obfuscation to the bitter end, the media would be putting him in the same category as all the rest. "It's all so complicated, impossible to get your head around, blah blah blah."
I can do it because I'm using natural language not formal logic and I'm mixing definition and factual observation. Granted, it's a little sloppy ;-)
What Yahoo Should Do
What you mean by the OOP side of things?

I find superlong indented blocks in Python a bit awkward, although can't explain why. When I look at a long class definition, for example, it just begs to be closed with end or "}". Small blocks though look definitely better without the block braces.

I'm thinking about introducing an optional end and leaving it to the taste of a programmer. Not sure yet.
Squeejee Launches TweetCongress.org - Find Your Congressman on Twitter
I like the idea, but it would be more meaningful if you could link for semantic reasons - that would be a very nice tool, could even be used by authors who want to put a book together from various essays they've written, etc. Or help you focus on an area of writing you're interested in by the author. I mention this because looking at the graph you can see that things that are related are not necessarily linked.
This is cool - led me to http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html in which I read "Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad" which makes me feel a little less insane for spending the morning working on my "pet language".
There are several advantages and disadvantages to different block sizes; but most significantly, larger blocks would make tarsnap less efficient at identifying duplicate data in the (very common) case where part of a file is modified. In the end it came down to weighing all the factors and picking a value which worked well.
I haven't been coding Python that long, but so far multi-line lambdas are the only downside I've seen to the significant whitespace syntax.

So I'd recommend going all Python or mixing Python plus some kind of multi-line lambda support.
Nah, it's only economists who are bankrolled by people who have a lot to gain if/when the economy picks up.

The rest of us tell it as we see it.

EDIT: It's just we can't get the same amount of air time...
I've used Python in the past and never once had problems with the 'whitespace thing'. However, I think it is limiting for things like templates where you want to sort of abuse the language and mix it up with text. Also, it seems to put lots of people off, and even if they're being a bit silly, it may be a consideration in terms of your goals of having the language adopted.
My handwriting quality has actually improved, but I've been using a computer since I was about 4 so I guess the only thing that could happen was improvement!
What I don't understand is why he ran it for so long. It would seem that he just waited for his scheme to collapse and then was arrested. Why didn't he skip town with all the money when it was at a maximum? Thats what a good fraudster does. Why wait around for 30 years?
Facebook's Brand Advertising Success Story: A Failure
You mention that it's more expensive than JungleDisk

No I don't. Tarsnap isn't more expensive than JungleDisk overall -- yes, the bandwidth and storage costs more, but tarsnap doesn't have per-request costs, a fixed monthly service charge, or an up-front cost for the software. For some people, tarsnap will be more expensive, certainly; but for many others tarsnap will be cheaper.

you don't say why it's better

Not in this blog post, no -- this post was about how tarsnap uses Amazon Web Services. :-)

Details about why I think tarsnap is an amazingly superior backup system are at http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-11-10-tarsnap-public-be...
Upmod on the parent for insight.

Criminal law has reached the point that cops can jail/get rid of about anybody they choose -- as long as the person doesn't have a lot of money.

Tax law is so complex that only the super-rich (and perhaps chairman of the House Financial Services Committee that writes the tax code) can comfortably avoid most taxation. The rest of us are left in a murky "best-guess" status as to what is allowed or not.

Back when the U.S. was getting started, many wanted a complex government like the Europeans had. Thomas Paine, a firebrand, warned against such complexity. When a tyrant oppresses you, he said, you know exactly whom to blame. When a complex government oppresses you, there is no one person to blame, and you continue to be more and more oppressed.
Perhaps, but the claims regarding brain emulation and "thinking" are way off. To begin with, we don't even know the biological basis of thinking--neurons firing is something even a slug can do, and has as much to do with thinking as walls and doors have to do with a research institute.

It's like saying: since we understand gravity now, designing spaceships with warp drive is just round the corner.
Going literally Python-style should be a total no-go as Python syntax cannot do blocks/multiline lambdas/anonymous functions. There are similar syntaxes like Ruby's that handle blocks/multiline lambdas/anonymous functions just fine.
I realised that my email wasn't in my hacker news account, so if you want to email, its markelhinney at gmail dot com.
The not too confusing part is especially important. It is very difficult to cut features down and very easy to build them up. Simplicity is king.
Honestly consider the smalltalk approach - particularly keyword parameters. The one thing I would do differently is use { and } for lambdas so you can use [ ] for arrays.
Note that Python effectively has an open-brace (the colon) but no close-brace except for unindent. Personally, I hate this because if I'm in emacs and I hit the tab (autoindent) key the result may or may not be what I want. I personally use a programming style where I use a PASS statement as a close-brace so my code can always be safely autoindented without changing its semantics. But this is rather ugly. It would be better to have a less obnoxious but still backwards-compatible close-brace, like ## or maybe #> Some day I'll hack emacs-mode.elisp to support this.
Ask YC: Colocation?
Anyone have recommendations/information for US colocation outside of California or the east coast?

A resource which plots backbone servers and major datacenters on a geographical map would be especially helpful. The only two half-decent (emphasis on 'half') resources we've found so far are:

http://www.colotraq.com
http://www.datacentermap.com

It would be nice if there was a Google Maps mashup or something better than DataCenterMap, but apparently that is (was?) considered a part of our nation's obscurity plan: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23689-2003Jul7
Yep. It's nuts. The only thing I write by hand is to-dos into my small notebook. And it really sucks when I can't figure out what I have to do because I can't read what I wrote.
That's quite a good idea.

My point with braces is that you dont have to indent the code then - which is dangerous :)

I have inherited a couple of PHP and C projects that have taken weeks just to indent to be readable - before i can even begin to work on them! (admittedly that is more of a PHP problem). Forced indentation makes definite that everything is obvious: addign curly braces is purely asthetic IMO :D
This would be really cool. Can you suggest a way, given
two essays, to decide if, semantically, the first should
point to the second? If an author could use a tool like
that it would mean that links could be discovered rather
than inserted by hand.

That would be valuable ... you've made me think ... I may
have a way of doing something close enough.

Hmm.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388562

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385322
To me, it doesn't really matter. As long as whatever editor I'm using has a good syntax highlighter, adapting to the language is easy.

I would say that as long as it's either easy to create syntax highlighting or the community gets some excellent syntax highlighters, it doesn't matter which way you go.
Python already has an optional end:

def something:
alpha()
omega()
#end

I think introducing it as a special case, with no semantic value, into your parser would be an extremely poor idea.
Video Review of “Tuttuki Bako” - the box you put your finger into
I can'r really comment on the quality of my own handwriting (nerve damage in my right arm from motorcycle accident years ago means limited dexterity in that hand) but observing others, like my daughter, her friends, etc. handwriting - yes, handwriting quality seems to be suffering. As is grammer, sentence structure, and punctuation. ;^)

I fear that like many of the skills we as people used on a daily basis, computers, automation and our 'convenience oriented' lifestyles are causing us to lose those skills like handwriting.
There are interesting exceptions. I have had the pleasure to visit eGovernments Foundation, http://www.egovernments.org/ , and Arghyam, http://arghyam.org/ the last week. Both are run by former Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and are doing some really fantastic work with limited resources.

I think it is fair to say that what is currently needed in India is not the same thing that is needed in California, which means that the work being done will not be the same. There are also different challenges, including problems finding the right kind of staff, power cuts and horrendous traffic.

To get some more impressions from our visit, check out our blog at: http://www.akvo.org/blog/
The phrase "it's a wash" in this context means that Git and Mercurial are essentially equal.
Yes, the brain analogy is grandiose fluff, which is a pity because the content is mind-blowing enough without it. If the discovery is as fundamental as the article implies, there's no telling what will be made of it.
(defun indent-buffer ()
"Indent entire buffer"
(interactive)
(indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil))
Of course it has. Especially since in the last 3 years, I haven't written one sentence on a piece of paper(I don't count filling out checks, signing credit card slips, or writing a shopping list).

In fact my writing is so bad, I find it easier to type out a shopping list in notepad and print it out, than write it on a piece of paper. Why? Because if I write it on a piece of paper, I most likely won't be able to read all of it, when I actually get to the store.
I used to put cases on stuff until I realized that two years later, that gadget had no resale value and I was slightly frustrated at the bulk/inaccessibility. From then on, I buy gadgets to enjoy them, not to lease them so I use everything without cases. I have a case for my iphone that I put on sometimes when it's around a lot of keys and change or the like, but 99% of the time, it's naked. I find that I'm much happier and `free' when I take the accepted loss on the gadget and use it like it's actually mine.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362005
A detailed error message is not a good introduction for an application framework: "Server error: templates: changeWorkingDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)"
Yes, calling something "the functional equivalent of the synapse" implies you know the function of a synapse...

The memristor has some functional properties in common with some synapses.

Neither synapses nor memristors have been fully characterized (though probably the memristor is better understood at this point).

The function of synapses in memory formation and information processing is poorly understood, but maybe having a nanoscale electronics component (memristor) that has some synapse-like attributes will increase the size of simulations to the degree that they will make interesting, testable predictions about how neural circuits work.
Lets Go Deep - Thank You Much Omar
Why not just use something like linode?
i keep laptops and musical isntruments incredibly well protected in transit: e.g hardshell case inside messenger bag, but no form-fitting cases.

Luggage i rely on : Patagonia, Chrome laptop case (from the guys that do nuclear messenger bags), Brenthaven MetroLite case (bombproof)
My handwriting has been very neat and tight. I write in cursive and in pencil, since being left-handed is horrible with pens, but people complain about it being too small and too light.

Woe is me? :P
Early in the article:

"[Chua] proved that memristor behavior could not be duplicated by any circuit built using only the other three elements, which is why the memristor is truly fundamental."

Later in the article:

"Emulating the behavior of a single memristor, Chua showed, requires a circuit with at least 15 transistors and other passive elements."

Reconciliation?
I actually have pretty good handwriting, so no. My handwriting has perhaps only improved from years on the keyboard. Coding and related pursuits are, for me, creative activities; my handwriting, I feel, is a manifestation of this temperament.
Completely agree. The main reason for my preference is that one of the things I hate most in C-style languages is that one-line functions take up three or four lines (depending on whether or not you use K&R style). This greatly increases the amount of scrolling you have to do.
The Sharpie Pen (which has the feel of their marker, but an extremely fine point) is the best writing implement that I have ever used.
No, because I usually plan things out on paper.
I'd suggest the complement to this is emulation. I have an emulator for my old CP/M environment. I understand there are several emulators for Mac OS pre-10 stuff. DOS emulators and modern virtual environments galore.

So, don't just move your data. Make sure you also include emulation applications/environments. You may end up with a set of matryoshka (Russian stacking dolls). But, if you drill down through them, you will always be able to access your data, even when in proprietary format. And with the continued increases in processing power, the old evironments remain usable even through the emulation.

I guess a few notes on how to use the emulation, might be well worth it as well. So that 5 years later, you have some reminder of how to connect the bubble gum to the bailing wire.

Open formats would be better. But you don't always get those, nor their continued maintenance and support.
There is a lot of tech coming out of the Netherlands and we hear about it because their english is very good. There's a lot of tech inside Germany, France, Italy, etc obviously but most of it is in their mother tongue. Just a few links off the top of my head:

http://phusion.nl/ (Passenger)
http://gitx.frim.nl/
http://www.quirksmode.org/
Don't take RSI lightly. If it hurts when you do that, don't do that. RSI is not protected by ADA, and it can take years to recover from.
Yes, definitely. I find that using a fountain pen improves my handwriting, as well as being more pleasurable than using a biro.
Try both, choose for yourself.
Unfortunately, India still does not recognize dual citizenship. For the gory details, see: [1] http://immihelp.com/nri/overseascitizenshipindia/ [2] http://immihelp.com/nri/pio-vs-oci.html

The author's claim that "The Indian government extends dual citizenship" is therefore incorrect.
Motorola RAZR (TM) Black Rubberized 
Perfect for a phone with an active lifestyle! The SkinTight case and holster provides rubberized protection and transportation for your Motorola RAZR phone. Soft rubbery feel gives great protection and grip to your phone.
You don't own the servers at Linode. Colocation is putting your server in someone's data center. This is good if you have a large number of custom servers, but don't want to manage the bandwidth, power, cooling etc... yourself.
Of course then you do have to manage hardware failures.
I think you are making 2 good points here.

First, we went through transition from begin...end to {...} and it porbably wasn't as painful for conservative folks as it is now when going from {...} to indentaion. So one question for a language designer is to whether target conservative public or not.

Second, mixing two styles when, for example, generating markup makes Python a burden. They don't go well together. You have to focus on two things: what your code is doing and proper indentation at the same time, while with C-style languages you worry only about the code. Oh, and the "isolate code from markup" concept hasn't been proven to be effective in all situations. So another decision to be made is to whether the language is going to be used on the Web.
FM Alexander argued that the process of learning handwriting was detrimental to the functioning of the human organism. The sooner computer abolish the activity, the better.
Sure, its no silicon valley but to say that there is no startup/research happening in Banglore is plain wrong.

I dont care about research, but I do about startups, and just a few of the startup conferences happening within one month in Banglore

1. www.proto.in
2. http://www.tiesummit.org/
3. Watblog VC mixer. (Cant find the link offhand)
4. Almost every weekend there is either of OCC/Startup Sat/Barcamp etc.

Just because you dont know where to look does not meen there is no startup activity in Banglore.
If you're more concerned with quality than cost you can't go wrong with Equinix. They're carrier neutral and extremely well connected.

http://equinix.com/equinix/locations/map/northamerica/
The Neurogenesis Experiment: Six ways to stimulate neuron growth
Even if you're not allowing macros and code-as-data, you may want to consider Lisp-style S-expressions. It doesn't take long to get used to the parentheses, especially given that good Lisp code uses indentation to such an extent that most of the parentheses "disappear" for a human reader.
python except make the meaningful whitespace thing optional. make a way to disable it. it's a problem in some contexts.