skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm still not convinced that it's possible to make the kind of super-long, defect-free nanotube cables that are going to be required. I'll be very happy if I'm proven wrong, but I certainly wouldn't say it was inevitable.
hey another post-rock fan! I've done my best coding while listening to Do Make Say Think.
It's not just Java. Apple's been awful with backward compatibility for years.

Every time Apple upgrades their Mac OS a frantic application re-write is often required from third-party developers just to get things working on the new platform. In contrast, I can pull out an application written 15 years ago for DOS and fire it up under Windows without a problem. Microsoft realizes how important it is to keep third-party software working on their platform and bends over backwards to provide that backward compatibility.

For our own software, we've not had to tinker with the base code (written on Win 98) at all under Windows.

Building desktop apps for Mac is a (lucrative) pain.
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Billions of particles of anti-matter created in laboratory
I think there's an obvious business model. It's "fire everyone." #1 in traffic, forget all the web 2.0 stuff, mindshare, and cut costs to the bone. Use the profits to concentrate on more cost cutting, more efficiency. Concentrate on being cheaper at everything. Where stuff is free, use the cost savings to show less ads. In business they call this strategy "low-cost provider."
Google’s Voice Search Finally Hits The iPhone
Argh! I wish there was an un-downmod button. I hate it when I accidentally miss and downmmod instead of upmod.
Downloaded and tried it out... you know what? It works nearly perfectly (90%?) for traditional searches... terrible for names.

Really wish it worked with address book!
Yeah, I would like to know where someone is going to find a quad-core harpertown for less than 600 per unit (unless it happens to "fall off the back of a truck"...)
Others have done well here, but I'll give it a go too, in procedural terms.

Objects are just a style of programming. As our program begins to process different types of data, we begin to see that some data always goes together and tends to hit certain branches of code together. This is because the code and the data together form an implicit model of how a particular kind of data should be handled.

Object orientation makes this explicit. We can store a little namespace of data in an object, and also give it a way to find the right code to run when it receives a 'message'. Then we can start to think of our program as a cascade of 'messages' between objects.
I usually listen to music with stupid lyrics (rap/hip hop), this way I don't really bother trying to understand what they are saying but still have a good rhythm to work with.
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Not just that. There are more recent calculations involving modern carbon composites somewhere in Google Groups.
Yahoo is a sad story no doubt. It's not they didn't try but there was something missing.

Google know one thing, we want to keep people going online, that's there main theme. If people are online they exposed to our adds, done deal.

Yahoo! didn't had that approach they lack the google buzz, the desire that they cause you to spend ridicules time using the net

I believe that it was the Yang responsibility, the man at the top leads the direction of the organisation. It looks like he was too busy making sure Yahoo! will stay independent, cool company instead of making it a profitable business,
Wow... This is both stunning, awesome, and scary.

If everything can be modified in the background in near realtime, how can we be assured any video is real? We probably cant already, but its just sort of an interesting realization.
Nah, there are a reasonably good number of people here who know PHP.
GPG Cheatsheet
To respond to your other concerns:

Are you sure you're doing it right? Maybe your design is too abstract. Beginners to OO often overdo generality and they especially overdo inheritance. If your only goal is to handle a few operations with one particular filesystem, there is no shame in writing well-commented procedural code.

OO is not in itself a way of solving problems. It's supposed to model your problem so you can change different parts independently. So, for instance, in code modelling a filesystem, you can have code that performs a 'read()' and gets data but doesn't have to know where the blocks are or if it's talking to a pipe or an inode.

I struggled with understanding OO for a long time too. In retrospect, one of my biggest problems was that I simply hadn't worked on systems that were large enough. I could fit all my programs in my head. When you can't fit the whole program in your head, you need strategies for knowing (not just guessing) exactly how many things your code will affect. So the idea of an object as a sort of contract emerges. You want a read() of 12 bytes from an inode to work just the same as a read() from a pipe. So you devise a sort of 'contract' that the general class of "FilePointer" has to adhere to, and then you try to fulfill that in InodeFilePointer and PipeFilePointer. Make sense?

Where OO really takes off is in collaborating with other programmers.

Some languages are so in love with OO, they decree that everything is an object. This can be annoying, but it's also helpful in the long run. If you're strict about it, it's impossible to write code with weird side effects or that relies on mysterious globals to communicate information. Because all state changes are captured in the object, and the object also carries around a notion of how to modify itself, you can write a new kind of object and be very sure it will Just Work.

Once we have divided responsibilities this way it becomes possible to change our models in one part of the code without changing them in other parts. (In procedural code we might have to change the function signatures of just about every procedure in the codebase.) It's even possible to add in 'Mock' objects that just test the behaviour of other objects.
why some developers prefer macs.
I probably missed the part of: what are the benefits of writing software on a Mac.

Developing C# on bootcamp is like developing Linux on Windows running VirtaulBox. I actually experienced the last sentence to one time thing, but on daily basis I would say its inefficient.

Personally after 4 years of windows development staying with Windows. I've got a Vista laptop and I admit that there are some challenges to get things done, but in all its working fine. For what I'm doing I can't see any benefit using a Mac
I don't think they did it on purpose, probably had to do with licensing. But it was probably serendipitous.
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Isn't that why insider trading laws exist?
Likening objects to things like refrigerators and toasters is where I get lost. Perhaps those examples work well in the classroom to help kids wrap their heads around the concept of OO ...

I have sometimes thought the same thing. There are ample explanations of the use of OOP put in terms of stuff like, poodle inherits from dog, which inherits from mammal etc. or a car could be represented as a series of objects interacting with each other, the engine, gear box etc. This is all perfectly fine and super easy to visualise. But the stumbling block for me is sometimes when I try to turn these ideas to something that's actually useful. Abstact concepts that indeed do not always have a neat corelation in the real world.

If anyone has some tips on how one can begin to develop a clearer method for modeling more abstract concepts in OO, I'd love to hear them.
He lacked vision, charisma, or basic common-sense strategies to salvage Yahoo, which for all intents and purposes is still a VERY solid company regardless of revenue and share price. Even with the bloodletting, there are still lots of great engineers and good-will there, yet he was unable to capitalize on any of it.
Apple is forcing some customers to buy Harpertown when they really want Yorkfield.
I've always wondered why, if you have a material sufficiently strong to build a space elevator, you don't just use it to wind composite fuel tanks for conventional rockets? At 150 times the tensile strength of steel, for example, you could make a pressure vessel that holds 150 times the pressure that you can with steel. Taking the densities as similar (sigma/rho is the relevant parameter) that should make pressure-fed rockets not just viable, but hugely preferable to turbo-pump-fed systems. It seems like you'd recoup your capital outlay much more quickly, even if you did (eventually) use more material to launch an equivalent mass of payloads.

For reference, in Engines of Creation (iirc), Drexler outlines a personal launch vehicle that weighed ~100 lbs and could lift a single occupant to leo with one stage. I suspect that the guys that finally do build a space elevator are really just going to end up with a nice place from which to watch personal spacecraft launches.
UCLA Law Prof's First Take On SEC/Cuban Suit
"... good on the author for working on a personal project, getting something he likes working and then using it. I just don't think it's news ..."

Neat software hacks are always news. I couldn't think of a better place to post your new bits of code.
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It’s Official. Facebook Is Running A Protection Racket On App Developers
top ten lists?? with bold headings? one sentence paragraphs?
You're right. Few things are as entrepreneurial as drug dealing or even ticket scalping :).
I thought that was the whole schtick (didn't read article yet but been reading about it). With nano tech we now had materials that could theroeticaly do it.
My Dad begs to differ.

Kidding kidding he's done very well for himself although his son only made it to Cub Scout level.
A common misconception about erlang is its degree of functional-ness. It isn't completely functional. As Peyton-Jones says, a completely functional language will just sit there and make the computer run hot[1].

Erlang is a well thought out compromise between tying your hands by restricting side effects (the monad approach) and allowing a wide audience of people to be quickly productive.

[1]: Changing the temperature of the environment can be considered a side effect thereby rendering the 100% functional language 99.999% functional.
They say "CEO" but they mean "hatchetman".
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ehh. you think people are going to waste effort and verify everyone's app for FREE?

there has to be some kind of lockout involved or every piece of crap will have to be picked apart.

this is assuming they actually run checks to make sure the apps are secure, useful, and genuine (not cons)

375$ per year IS steep, however

i would never pay that
A lot of people blame Yang for Yahoo's troubles.

So where does the buck stop then, if not with Yang?
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a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, [which] means this nanotube "ribbon" has to be pristine and perfect throughout its entire length.

To be precise, it only has to be as strong as its engineering factor of safety along its entire length. Also, fundamental to the understanding of composites is the transmission of loads from the fiber to the matrix. This load is transferred via shear pressures along the length of the fiber at the interface with the matrix. The net result is that the load is transferred along a very large area and results in a low shear pressure in the matrix. Composite engineering is a tricky business, but even with current fiber materials, you can build a part that has ~7 times the strength/weight of metals, much lower modulus of elasticity, and a linear fatigue curve.

you need to construct the...counterweight in space as well...and we don't have an elevator to GET it there until we make the first one

Most current plans actually unwind the tether from the middle. Then, in much the same way as cables are strung across canyons starting with a bow and arrow and a string, this initial tether is just strong enough to haul up another larger line, and so on. A single launch using any of the heavy lift vehicles in service today would be sufficient to launch the starting material into a suitable orbit.
Would that not be the way to guarantee that they never do anything innovative ever and let other people eat away at there market cap?
Two rather depressing maps of Africa:

http://uuorld.com/gallery?image=166

http://vimeo.com/2131732
:( when I'm looking at kitten photos on a flickr clone I'd prefer not to be blasted with unblockable ads.
Thanks for the support, guys. This is a great idea and definitely something we want to get to.
i see this quite often and it's usually a good indicator that the project is going to go nowhere.

non-developers post on a users mailing list about an idea, some other non-developer joins in with "hey i'll setup a wiki!" and someone else chimes in with "i'll make a logo and a website!" in the end you have all this planning and meta-development for nothing, and no code ever gets written.

look on sourceforge and see how many projects are in pre-alpha/planning stages with no code uploaded and how long they've been there.

a common phrase in the openbsd developer community is "shut up and hack." a developer's time is much better spent writing code and showing it to someone than writing up a technical spec about how something should quite possibly maybe some day be if we're lucky and follow the roadmap exactly.
In retrospect, it would have been better for shareholders to let Carl Icahn takeover and tear Yahoo to shreds and bend over for Microsoft. To make such a choice then, I just don't see a CEO giving it up like that. Thats why the proxy voted the way it did.
Improve Your Luck Scientifically
Have you checked out Chet Haase & Romain Guy's Filthy Rich Clients in Java? Pretty slick in my opinion as far as Java UIs go. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=155276)

It is worth noting that Chet has since moved to work for Adobe, and Romain now works at Google on the Android UI.
How would that be different than what they were doing previously?
The language that fits this description best is Erlang, I would say ... (what, in this definition, is specific to objects compared to processes?)
I've often thought that history etc for cms/blog systems should be pushed off to a proper version control system etc. I even drafted out a project spec to implement basically the same thing as this guy.

He implements this and open sources it, and yet it is not worth a post on HN to you? What is?
I got the sample once for each loop. (Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64, Firefox 3.03)

I'm guessing it has something to do with the browser caching and is not specific to the OS.
Yang to step down as Yahoo chief
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Back in my musician days, I once took a class in 16th century counterpoint, which if you've never done it, is quite challenging. The instructor said that we would need to sleep a lot to let our unconscious minds work in order to learn the material. He was right.
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Old school Steve Jobs
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Eh, blogs have been positively drooling over the Volt for some time now, and given that it has the word "Chevy" attached to it, that's saying something.
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My Son Was Autistic. Is He Still?
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I still don't think you understand. There's always a toll for any patent you didn't register. Patent licensing often lowers it. Buying a patent is often more expensive than renting, especially if the renting is non-exclusive. Patent trolls often buy the patent and license it out to multiple companies, creating competition and lowering the barrier to entry.

The best patents commanded a high price even before there were patent licensing businesses. In fact, now the amount you can make off of a great patent is higher because the demand is.

It's really only because they occasionally sue that people complain, but without lawsuits their business model wouldn't work.
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Two reasons: First, it does feel faster. Second, I don't have flash enabled in konqueror, which makes some websites far less obnoxious.
I thought you weren't supposed to give out answers.
SIGOPS - Create Your Own Operating System Adventure
Ask HN: Where do I find a custom browser/app?
I hope to find a custom app (perhaps a tiny web browser?) that comes in Windows, Linux and Mac varieties, graphically interprets Javascript and CSS and HTML like a normal web browser, can maintain 4 keep-alive connections with the server by default, and has customizable HTTP header settings.

I would like this special browser/app to be used by the folks who participate in our future live online auctions. This app should be customizable on the server before the bidder downloads it, such that each downloaded copy has a built-in encrypted userID embedded into it which uniquely identifies that particular bidder.

Such a browser/app will need to request data from only one web server, so tabs and location bars and most of the other 'features' common in todays popular browsers are totally unnecessary. The server's URL can even be hard-coded if necessary so the app will have no use anywhere else.

Any links or suggestions for places where I might find such an app -- or the tools to help me create one -- are greatly appreciated, thanks.
I'm glad they are putting this verification process in place, and I think it is fair that some of the cost of this process is borne by the developers. I'm not sure whether $375 is fair in that respect - I'd have to see the math.

But what I find disturbing (and inflammatory) about this post is the accusation of 'protection racket'. By Arrington's logic, the following would also be protection rackets:

1. The driving license assessment fee, for operating a motor vehicle on public roads.

2. Assessment fees and membership fees paid by professional coaches (e.g. to make sure your ski instructor is up to standard)

3. The requirement that porn stars have regular STD test to minimize infection. These are paid for out-of-pocket by the actor.

I am glad that we have all the above three, and am happy to see Facebook App verification added as a fourth.

It is however important to ensure that the cost is reasonable. Perhaps Facebook could allow developers the option of having their app verified by a 3rd party? That way market forces would make the pricing 'fair'.
I'm the exact same way. techno + baroque (Bach fugues especially) I at least feel more productive.

And given the number of other people who express similar tastes it makes me think there may be a market opportunity for a team of music theory nerds + neuroscientists + programmers to come up with a box that generates "music to think by".

(I want to believe that certain Bach fugues are wired into the universe at the level of apodeictic mathematical truth.)
Exactly. Facebook is very close to becoming a communications company. In fact they're not even that different than a walled-garden carrier. Both companies are aiming for the same target, they just have different starting assets...
I've thought about this a lot. I really don't think it's possible for someone to comprehend what it is like to be someone of substantially greater or lesser intelligence. Most smart people think that dumb people are just like them but maybe not quite as good as math, or maybe just mentally lazy. Most dumb people think Barack Obama is just like them but a more polished speaker.

The exception being noted geniuses like Einstein, who most people view as demigods that are so rare as to be nearly fictional.
so this is not < 64 words and less of a description of OO and more to your solicitation of "inspire me" of why you should care about it. The critical distinction IMHO:

Procedural programming is like a recipe- you program a sequence of instructions and while there can be if/then, loop and other logic constructs, it still runs like a "choose your own adventure" book. Since you have an imperfect view of the world and how requirements will evolve and you're providing what are essentially sequential instructions, it's brittle and unforgiving to unanticipated requirements.

OO is less about writing instructions and more about creating a representation of the world (or at least the aspects you care about) as objects and having them interact with each other to achieve things. Because you're modeling the entities involved and having them interact rather than imposing a prescriptive set of instructions from above, it's cleaner and more resilient to unanticipated requirements.

Granted it's overkill to use OO for simple tasks when a script will suffice. But if you're building a system that involves interaction of different entities and will need to be adapted & maintained it will almost certainly be more productive to use an OO approach. Btw, I found this book provides the most concise and useful primer on OO I've seen: http://www.amazon.com/Object-Technology-Managers-David-Taylo...

sean
One system that appears to meet your needs is Joomla Community Builder with the Simple Machines Forum plugin.

This gives you a fully configurable forum including multiple ways of configuring Karma/Reputation, etc. It also gives you the community features that would potentially facilitate the rationalist meetups that you mention.
Drop.io/hackernewsresume

It's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but some employers didn't quite get it.
My favorite part:

if (typeof canvas.getContext != "undefined")
{
....
}
else
{
alert("Sorry, your browser doesn't support wicked cool graphics. Please download one that supports wicked coolness.");
...
}
Schools Make Fish Smarter
I think the secret law was that airlines couldn't tell you you were on the watch-list. Now they can, but can be fined for telling you that you're on the watch-list without you being on the watch-list.

Yes, this is a stupid law. I hope Obama shit-cans the TSA.
Check out bleacherreport.com. It's a lot like what I think you're describing, but for sports. People write original articles, other people can edit them, and everyone can vote. Writers who have gotten big on there have gotten contracts.

I'd love something like that for rationalism, and would write for it a bit. I'd even invest a small amount if you need. In fact, I'd be surprised if you wouldn't get into YC with that idea :)
Slinkset is awesome if you're looking for a social news site, but I get the feeling that's not what he's talking about. He's speaking less of links and more of a place for the community to post original material. Unless I'm inerpreting wrong, in which case yeah, go with Slinkset.
Oh boy! Your time at Y! was that bad eh? ;-)
I find it strange that it's $375/yr as opposed to a smaller amount per change (that's per app change and per significant change to APIs etc.)
Wimps Wait. Revolutionaries Release Early.