skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought this was a really great article. I remember _why's disappearance with sadness, but even his info-immolation could take nothing away from how much his work meant to me.

It was 2005 or so and I was at university, feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything. Going from a high school where just knowing what a command prompt is makes you the baddest dude in computer class to sitting in a lecture where breadth-first search is assumed knowledge is... humbling, to say the least.

It was around that time that someone pointed me to Joel on Software, which was bombshell number one. He wrote so beautifully about software and software projects that I just read through his archives straight from start to finish in a few days. He had positive things to say about Ruby, and mentioned _why's poignant guide, so I gave it a look.

Bombshell number two was the poignant guide, or just Ruby itself, or maybe both. In my memory, it's hard to disentangle the two, because _why was so much a part of Ruby, and in so many ways a product of Ruby. I'd written C, and that felt like being a badass basement-dwelling hacker, flipping bits by night and making out with Angelina Jolie by day. With Perl I felt like some kind of rambling longbearded wizard who could topple mountains if only he could get his sigils sorted out.

But Ruby? Ruby felt like fun. It felt like: hey, relax, it's only programming, you know? Code doesn't have to be for building bridges or hacking Gibsons; it can be a craft, an art in itself. _why's guide was the distilled essence of that message. Cartoon foxes, a soundtrack(!), and self-reference applied with the subtlety of a child's fingerpaint. I loved every minute I spent with that wonderful guide and its wonderful language.

So Ruby got popular and started to grow up. We got web frameworks, JIT compilers and package managers. We got to be a ghetto for a while, which was sort of a joke but not really. DHH swore at people and made 37 billion dollars. Later on there was some stuff about porn stars but by then I wasn't really paying attention.

I mainly write Node and Coffeescript now; they feel like successors to Ruby's technical legacy but the culture's not the same. Maybe it's just that I'm different now, or maybe the programming community's fallen hard for the Jobs and forgotten the Woz. Still, every now and again I pull up irb and Project Euler, foo.each-do-|bar| my way through a few problems for old times sake, and a part of me relives that feeling of childlike joy.

Not many languages get to have their own Peter Pan, but Ruby had _why, and it was better for it. A person, a language, and a community; none of them can stay young forever. But a legend never ages, never goes into maintenance mode, never gets buried neck-deep in strategy tax. I can't hate _why for info-dying young and leaving a good looking cyber-corpse. The memory will stay with me long after the code is irrelevant. So thanks, _why, if you're out there. And thanks, Annie, for an article that did the memory justice.
HTML5 Tutorial: Drag&Drop API
http://pastie.org/3601710
Tune in, it's great!:wq
I think your problem here is that the terrorists weren't out as Jokers--they weren't attempting indiscriminate destruction of resources and benefits (regardless of what the government/news might lead you to believe).

Somewhat thankfully, true destroy-all-the-things thinking writ large and competently executed seems to be a very rare thing in the species.
Fail Better
Introducing MapBox Streets, a New World Map Powered by Open Data
Going for Google Plus Circles - The Fight Has Began
I know that you probably are a fan of classic SEO because it brings lots of genuine traffic and converts best, but Google seems to believe that their social media website can do even more.

That's why they implemented the Google personal results which are supposed to change the way we search online. What do you think? Is this kind of searching better than any other and most importantly, isn't it easy to affect by getting more circles or +1?
The question that has nagged me more than "Where's _why?" is "Where's nickb?" Did anyone ever find out?
I've just done that on Gentoo source installed nginx by following these simple steps:

* Get old version config flags with -V, e.g /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -V

Mine had:

nginx: configure arguments: --prefix=/opt/nginx --with-http_ssl_module --with-cc-opt=-Wno-error --add-module=/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.9/ext/nginx

Download tarball:

* wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.0.14.tar.gz

Extract and configure passing the same flags:

* tar zxvf nginx-1.0.14.tar.gz && cd nginx-1.0.14

* ./configure --prefix=/opt/nginx --with-http_ssl_module --with-cc-opt=-Wno-error --add-module=/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.9/ext/nginx

Compile and install

* make && make install clean

The make install action will check for old directories and files so no need to worry about stuff being overriden.

Verify your nginx version with:

/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -v

nginx version: nginx/1.0.14

:)
if it's really that important to you, quit bitchin and start coding!
I don’t have a track record of being reclusive, so I wouldn’t be offended by someone persisting a bit. But if it got around that I don’t want to talk to people about something I did, I guess I would be ill at ease if someone pursued me about it.

I’m not saying it’s wrong in some grand or absolute sense, there are going to be some things where a person disapproves without necessarily thinking there should be a law or an absolute, iron-clad, airtight legal definition.

Perhaps the word I should have used—and I apologize for being discourteous to Annie in my remarks—is “discourteous.” Having thought about it and considered the many thoughtful replies here, I think it was discourteous to persist, but not necessarily wrong.
The Pattern library has sentiment analysis built-in, pretty fun toolkit to play around with.

http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/pages/pattern-en#sentiment
I love this conference. Won't live stream since I'm in the front row.
Each of the scenarios 1 through 3 builds upon each other. The outcomes of 1 and 3 are similar, but in scenario 2 jokers are introduced into the mix, and in scenario 3 batmans are introduced to counteract the jokers.

...I believe the author is saying that if you have jokers, you need batmans to neutralize their effect.
America hates you because you're a moron who thinks that it's right to stop in public places and preach your Religion and before you go ahead and pull that you don't know about being a Muslim, I was born a Muslim, I still live in a Muslim Country and I know more about Islam than you ever will know. My family comprises of diehard Muslims and you know what, even though I come from a very religious background, I would still never do what majority of Muslims do. Cheat, lie and basically act like idiots or hate infidels or Jews.

I am honestly tired of this, you get the OMG angry stare because you deserve it, and you get bumped by people because you went out of your way to show everyone you're a Muslim. It’s not their fault if your fellow brethren are hell bend of bombing them, try coming to Pakistan with your white man attitude, everyone will be sizing you up and finding ways to exploit you or kidnap you for ransom.

If you're a Muslim it doesn't mean you're special, as much as you want to hide it, you hate infidels, you would cut them off given a chance. Sure we can say it's a religion that is peaceful, BS bro. Religion is great for guiding people, and it’s an amazing tool when used correctly, which in this case it doesn’t.

In short, America doesn't hate you, you hate yourself and you hate everyone else. I suggest you move to Qatar or Pakistan, you will feel at home here and before you begin to bitch about more, Christian in Pakistan are treated the same way maids in the movie The Help are treated. Muslims are racists as well.

I am technically a Muslim but I was lucky to be part of something else, something much bigger than one religion. For me everyone is equal, your race, your religion doesn't matter. If I hate you it's only because you did something that deserve my negative attention. That doesn’t mean Americans are awesome, no they’re idiots as well. Well, majority of them are idiots but you get that everywhere.
Stop pulling the religion card, if you’re such a devoted Muslim, go in the cave and look for guidance there, leave the rest of us alone. Is that hard?
Church encodings in JavaScript
sure, K-9 Mail works fine and implements everything correctly. But what happens when you have 4 or 5 apps that start polling constantly for updates because they don't want to deal with push notifications? I think Apple opening up this functionality would be a mistake that's open for abuse by other developers.
I would be interested in how it changes the model if you assume that everyone is a continually varying mix of Joker, Cooperator and Defector, with also a value for how impressionable/stubborn they are.

Fixed roles and actions with a narrowly defined intents seem to be very common in these kind of thought experiments, mainly, I suspect, because it makes them easier to model. However I think it robs them of any real utility, and worse can give an illusion of insight that is entirely based on flawed assumptions.
I recently had to deal with this when shopping for a shipping system to replace our ugly old Filemaker plugin. "Call us for a quote", having to wait through two weeks of sales cycle to get an API doc that should've just been on the web site (the worse was the company that had a full wiki for their API, but only available to customers), features written in marketing-speak instead of displaying the real capability of the product, etc. These were good products being horribly sold.
A few years ago I looked up his earliest papers, and it's interesting that his work on Bayesian networks essentially seemed to start as an effort to detect causality among sets of random variables, i.e. given a Bayesian network, which random variables can be said to "cause" others? Of course, Bayesian networks start by assuming you know every random variable's distribution, so verifying independence is easy but finding it is hard. I've always thought an interesting research project would be to try the same approach with correlation functions instead of distributions, and see how far you can get.
you remind me of an unwanted salesperson or recruiter invading someone else's space.

Being an asshole is no excuse whatsoever whether you are covering a public figure or not in a story..

most on HN will not state this plainly but you are behaving like an asshole..please stop
How much work did the technical co-founder do compared to you and how much % did he get?
Loving this conference!
You've probably heard of Hidden Markov Models. They're widely used in many machine learning applications. An HMM is just a simple, easy-to-compute Bayesian inference network.

The idea of Markov chains predates Pearl. His work was a demonstration of the accuracy and power of Bayesian inference networks. He revitalized that idea at a time where programmers were just beginning to have the data and processing power to apply machine learning.

The rest is history.
Thanks for streaming @mwrc
3D print a custom iPhone case with your favorite sound from SoundCloud
Brendan Eich has talked about why bytecode + VM is a bad idea for a browser: http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122

If you really want a VM, it already exists. It's called JavaScript, assembly language of the web.

I would hate for sites to start saying, "Requires the PyJSVM v0.8 or better to function, download it now!"

EDIT: in hindsight, this post was careless. I was wrong about the "PyJSVM" point, and I posted the minutewithbrendan link to provide commentary, not "Eich said it, so it must be true."

What I should have said:

JavaScript is so widely used today, that anything that comes along purporting to be better (such as bytecode, Dart, whatever) must be so much better as to provide a clear reason for developers and users. If it's just "better", then JS will remain dominant because it's good enough. Therefore, it makes sense to target JS from other langs. It's definitely not getting slower, and we're on the cusp of some great APIs!
Exactly, as a single consultant, I don't have the time to sell to every one, so I use this tactic to pre-qualify potential clients.
It's also a great way to learn more about the customer and try to judge your potential value to them, thus giving you both a better insight in whether or not it is actually worth going into the details of price.
That's a good point, thanks!

At the moment, the background isn't actually being scrolled at all. If I were to apply a patterned background to the element that gets scrolled around, I'd have to increase its size so that the screen always stays inside of it. I'm also not sure how a background image would affect the performance of the rotations.
On a slightly less controversial tangent, the author did a nice job explaining getting up and running with her first program as well as explaining what programming does. The comments at the article thus far are mainly from programmers. It would be interesting to see how much non-technical folks take away from it.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for someone to come along and 'fix' this. :)
Teach the controversy!

In the meantime, the data supporting statins are among the best ever compiled. The advances contributed by groups calling themselves "holistic" are entirely absent. And the willingness of modern medicine to introspect and change in the face of data is slow but meaningful.

I asked this same question the other day and still have yet to get a meaningful response: what is the "holistic" treatment for HIV?
I knew someone on HN would know. Thank you sir.
Disappointing graphics so far. This is what i think Diablo3 should look like these days,
http://uiu.bravehost.com/THIS-is-what-Diablo3-should-look-li...

Anything less and i´m not interested.
Inner workings of magnets may lead to faster computers
HOW TO: Create Surveys for Market Research
I'm interested to hear about expectations for Diablo III. I'm long ATVI because of their dividend, financials, and value fundamentals. Gaming also seems like a growth industry and Blizzard/Activision have some strong gaming franchises. I figured the upcoming Diablo III launch would only help the situation.
The Voronoi Diagram example is quite mesmerizing. http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/voronoi.html
A master. Not just at his craft, but of his own story as well.
I can give you a feed of random brackets pretty easily if you like. Send me an email (email is in my profile).
The sum total of the improvements were not incremental. Testing helped give me a more incremental path, but from the outside you would not have perceived them as such.
Cool! I'd love to come. Let's see if I get an invite :D
Having been in sales for most of my career (well entrepreneurship is sales so all of my career), I can tell you the premium for a "customer database" within a sales organization. Any good sales organization will do every and anything they can to get your info so that they can do exactly what everyone hates, put you in their CRM cycle... you'll get emails, pamphlets, calls, everything until you die (hence the credo "Die or Buy"). I would venture to guess that as these companies were designing their sites, they looked at their competitors and figured out "wow, everyone else is requiring all of the info before we give them a quote, what a great way to build a 'database'". Clearly not the case, but I'm also guessing Ceridian was the only one to really think about how a customer views the quote getting process. As such, they come out ahead...
4.5 Billion Years of the Moons Evolution in 3 minutes
PG's old spam filter (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html) is another example of applied Bayesian inference. Not directly related to Pearl's work, but he basically deserves credit for the wider renaissance in Bayesian techniques.
he got between 10-20% equity and we were doing a comparable amount of work (10-20hr per week) up until I quit my job. now I'm putting in more hours.
this started happening at a local Chipotle i go to at lunch. you actually pay while in line, then order your food, then show your receipt to cashier as proof. seems weird to me in this setting because what if i change my mind on what i want to eat based on what looks good. i guess it is more efficient though.
First GraphLab workshop in Bay Area (July)
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3obpuo/
Wayfair - Office Tour [slideshow]
Blizzard doesn't really seem to focus on cutting edge graphics. They know their market really well and know how to make games that look pretty enough which run on almost any hardware.
Without benchmarks, that's kind of a pointless assertion. I'd guess that both methods are close in performance most of the time but don't really know.

Anyway sometimes you need drawing code -- it's much more animatable, for example.
FaceTime Video Calls Still Limited to Wi-Fi as LTE iPad Rolls Out
Spacebar scrolling is actually already implemented, not sure why it's not working for you.
You wouldn't, you would do server side compilation, if we could require users to install a plugin we would already do it today and not bother with JS.
Long Distance Relationships Tips for Today
Carriers do not need to 'support' FaceTime over 4G in a any technical way. It is just data THAT THEY DONT WANT YOU TO USE!

I am so angry about this.
Google Gives Search a Refresh - Amir Efrati - News - AllThingsD
So basically, a cup of hot chocolate made with skim milk?
Open-Source Segway-Like Scooters
Absolutely, but my point is that not having the option for the notifications is fine by me now that I've realized I can live without. I should have made that clearer though.
Great Food for Thought: How Designers Hit The Wall
Seems about right. Windows 8 Tablets will be about 1/3 as good as iPads so they're right on schedule.
Anonymous Releases Their Own Operating System: Anonymous-OS
fine...why not chat? Not as much pressure on the customer to just have a quick chat online...phone calls are much more pressure intensive
The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak
I exercise this, in general. Always have tried to. Which is one reason I'm more than a bit annoyed at e.g. the chronic posters on HN who flood posts on every conceivable topic, at times adding an empty query string, an anchor, or whatnot onto/into the URL to bypass the duplicates filtering.

It's not about you! It's about the community.

In real life, I often receive compliments on my gifts because I've actually paid attention to the receiver, over time, and have put some thought and attention into finding something I think they will really enjoy. Not necessarily, or even often, something they have asked for. But something that I have worked out they would like -- not infrequently, an item they were actually unaware of. My perception and attention seems to be as appreciated as the gift itself.

That is being social. Not a bunch of non-questioning "How are you?"s, nor tweeting every personal chuckle.

Paying attention to, and taking care of and for, the other person. Will this really add to their day or well-being?
London Ishq is not YRF’s Latest Venture: YRF
http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/iphone/faq/articles/PushBoxcar...

And we'll have a blog post up at http://blog.boxcar.io here soon too. It's a bit easier than the above now, as you can just choose "Sparrow" from the list of Installed Clients to have it work.
The seven deadly sins of a startup
Macros provide new binding constructs. That is their number one use in my 10+ years of Scheme programming.
this is outstanding. Does anyone know if you can change the color of labels? they don't match my gmail label colors.
Goldman Loses $2.2B for Shareholders on NYT Op-Ed
that's interesting, but i'm not sure i follow or agree - i can't put numbers on it, but intuitively his variance feels a bit like, but less than, poker's variance. Poker graphs look like a sawtooth of small losses and big wins. This means he would have to get spectacularly unlucky to be down after 50 sessions, given his positive pre-tax expectation[1].

so it depends how he structures his taxes. if he can get his taxes calculated yearly instead of per session, taxes make him a bit less of a winner. if his taxes are calculated per session, he is -EV. this is the same problem that poker players face, IIRC the precedent there is that if you file as a small business you can sum your wins and deduct your losses annually.

(/me used to be a small-time poker player)

[1] expectation in blackjack is computable because perfect play is deterministic, expectation in poker is harder because it depends on human factors like your mood and your opponent's skill level and his mood. you can only measure past expectation. A lot of players think they are winners but are really breakeven or losers, but blame it on bad luck.
100% with you here - the latest version of Sparrow has some serious bugs that cause among other things, kernel panics. Previous versions have seen silently deleted messages, and other such nonsense. An email client should be, above all, reliable.
I was just thinking that myself. I tried to zoom in to read text and the navigation got in the way.
I agree current laws are crap. But isn't is possible for someone to refrain while traveling to avoid such a circumstance? And no, medical use is crapola - folks treat this like some miracle drug.
Congrats on the launch! And thanks for sharing your experience with us. I'm at the start of a very similar process. I've been sitting on an idea over the past year and had a false start with a co-founder. I'm now pushing on on my own, so you've given me some great ideas on the various stages.
Thanks for the inspiration!! Good luck!!
Just quick question, since I lost a track of AppStore Developer's guides&rules: wasn't there a rule that an app that is copying functionality provided in iOS will not be approved? Was that changed? Aside of this email app, I dont see any music players for my iPod other than the native Apple app (I see plenty of opportunities for an upgrade).
Python becomes a platform. Thoughts on the release of clojure-py.
glad it was a worthwhile read!
Three Problems with Scrum
> you would be set for any future resolution increases.

Only if you're willing to release an update. There's something to be said about having it already ready for any future resolutions, now.
This year, my motto is: "Tests or it doesn't exist" - don't use any code that isn't tested or the author is unwilling to accept contributed tests.
I thought this mentality would be a given on HN but thanks for writing about it.

I would go even further to state that "no way am I going to meet you for a price".

I just recently had the task of finding the cheapest storage lockers for myself.

I called 5 companies. 4 of which gave me their pricing immediately. The 5th company had the most ridiculously gung-ho storage locker saleswoman I almost laughed... she refused to give me a firm price, and suggested that I drive in to meet her (~45 minutes) before she will even hint and what I might be paying..?

I told her I was an experienced (and cranky) entrepreneur at heart and that I didn't feel like playing this game right now. She persisted and I hung up.

Maybe they make more money that way, but it sure is a bad business model.

Car salesmen work the same way I have noticed... I visited a large block of car salesmen recently... Time is money so I simply walked into each dealership and asked them for a price list of a few cars I was interested in.

Nobody would give me one. Not without sitting down for some kind of appointment with a scummy salesman (when they were all just standing around drinking coffee anyways, we're at the height of their demise here).

How is this business tactic still in practice?

I would think consumer protection laws would target it at some point? If you sat my brother down with any salesman, he would walk away much poorer.

He wasted $200 on a "gold HDMI cable" and would probably waste an extra $10,000 on a car if given the opportunity with a salesman, not that he has the money.
Simplify Subversion with this EasySVN for Windows release (free client)