skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jokes have been historically used by oppressed people to express their frustrations. Not saying it's the same thing here, but trying to ban humor, even if it is politically incorrect, is really not OK.

Nobody is trying to ban edgy/dark humor. But there is a time and a place for that. A corporate event is not that place.

The world would be a much better place if we smiled more.

http://therealkatie.net/blog/2012/mar/21/lighten-up/
Vishnu Temples in India Gateway to Heaven | Go Heritage India Journeys
https://openshift.redhat.com/community/faq#t2n9495

Where can I get more information on Pricing ?

To get more information on the pricing and timing of a paid version of OpenShift please send an email to openshift@redhat.com
Has anyone tried eye-tracking to decide where to re-focus? I found it slightly tedious to look at part of a picture and to have to click there...
Perian Shutting Down, Going Open Source
>>Without sites like this, people might continue thinking that this sort of behaviour is acceptable.

Are you aware of how insulting this assertion is?

Clearly not...
Doctors note 
While using a fake doctor’s note is a bit unethical, its prevalent use today indicates that people have many reasons to justify it. It continues to be a contentious topic with divergence of opinion on the matter. Many people do not consider fake doctor’s excuses to constitute a major offense, and do not see it as any different that telling a small lie that hurts no one, and does not carry any major consequences. Two of the most common justifications for using a fake note e is that many people today cannot afford healthcare and visiting a doctor is expensive, and people do not get enough time off in a society that does prioritizes work over rest.
With a couple of months of programming knowledge, I wrote a program that saved my company $2MM/year. The key was combining knowledge of the business processes with some knowledge of programming. There were people with knowledge of one or the other, but not both.

I still can't write a basic app, but that doesn't matter. I can do things that provide massive value, and I wouldn't be able to do them without programming knowledge.

I think Jeff is underestimating how much time the average office worker would save simply by learning Excel Macros or some basic scripting. Learning to program is really damn valuable, especially in fields where most people don't know any programming.
I'm sorry there is no evidence that a particular language is 'better' than any other.

All human languages have very similar every day vocabularies - English happens (now) to have a very large specialist vocabulary (which wasn't available to Shakespeare) and which it actually shares with most other languages.

Shakespeare got his vocab up by generating a host of new English words from French, Latin and the other dominant languages of the time.

As we speak the Kiyuku Shakespeare is stealing words for his play.

> the nuance of the finer English texts could be adequately captured in Hieroglyphics

On a technical point you could copy Shakespeare into it now - it has (most) of the current English sounds and with a couple of conventions/accents you would be good to go. I wouldn't recommend switching writing systems anytime soon.
Is Google Turning Us Into Cyborgs?
Love this idea. There have been plenty of times when I wish I could throw a few questions at an expert in a given field. "Is this the best way to program an XYZ?" "Can you think of a better way to do this?" Is the price is right, throwing a small amount of cash at a problem is often a better solution than (a) doing something wrong, or (b) spending significantly more time figuring out how to do it right.
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I think all of the jobs that you have listed involve using computers to automate, manage and solve problems.

Except rather than how we wield writing algebra or English pros, with advanced skill giving us the ability to express elaborate and abstract concepts, most people are computer illiterate.

Their use of the computer is analogous to knowing nothing about algebra or English, and choosing predetermined sentences to write pros, or choosing predetermined equations to do algebra. If what you want to express isn't supported, or what you have available isn't what you want, you're screwed.

People should be able to accomplish what they want with a powerful language. English and Maths are both powerful languages that are tools for modelling life and facts, coding models process and automation. It's not essential in the same way growing up in the Amazon rain forest where maths and arithmetic beyond "one, two and many" isn't essential. It's undoubtedly desirable and beneficial, however.
The problem is that the amateur programmers are unlikely to be building doghouses. What is more likely is that you end up maintaining someone's Macro laden excel spreadsheet because it is now mission critical infrastructure.

What tends to work as a happy medium for me is that I implement a proper relational database on the backend but have it output spreadsheets which people can Macro till their hearts content on the understanding that the database is the definitive copy.

I also allow people to upload their spreadsheets back to the database where it will import only changes to certain fields and heavily sanitize everything.

It's difficult to think of a programming task that is equivalent to building a doghouse, perhaps building a personal website with PHP might fill this niche but there are still security aspects to consider.
"Initial Program Load", which actually makes more sense than "bootstrap".
The product engineer
It's interesting that you mention traffic from search results. I do a lot of queries, on a lot of topics, some of which Quora could probably give me an answer to, and I have never, ever, seen a Quora question appear in Google's results. Until I checked, I actually thought Google didn't index them (it does, but I only see it when I put "Quora" in the query, which kind of defeats the purpose).

Could be due to a lot of things (location, Google bubbling me, etc) but frankly, if that's what they rely on, I feel they have a long way to go. They are very far behind Wikipedia or Stack Overflow, for that purpose (even if those aren't their most direct competitors).
I sometimes work at home, lying on my sofa. I sometimes work while drinking a fresh orange juice or a caffe latte at a nearby coffee shop. I sometimes take trips and work from wherever.

I can't stand being tied to a physical location and working through remote desktop is too painful to bother, feasible if something is burning, but not otherwise.
Global push to guarantee health coverage leaves US behind
I am absolutely not arguing agains this. Here's the extract from your text I disagree with:

> I can’t think of many other skills that enable you to create something from scratch and reach as many people as knowing how to set up a simple website.

> Just last week, I was able to come up with an idea and then launch a site in 2 days. That site was then seen by about 10,000 people in a couple hours.

> Think about it: something I did reached 10,000 actual living people and had an impact (however small) on their life. That would never have been possible if I didn’t know how to code.

This text is arguing that the value of learning programming is in the software you will create and the impact it will have on a population. This would be a valid point when arguing why one should become a programmer.

Drawing on an analogy similar to the one you make: Learning to write is crucial today, even though I will probably never be a published author. Similarly, learning to code is important, but not because "you too, can make a website!".
The Right Way to Use Forums for Link Building
Get That Content Published
How would that work? Part of what makes photography a creative art is choosing a creative, personal exposure from a range of visually valid possibilities for a given scene. Once a shutter speed has been selected you're pretty much stuck with it and I'm not sure any camera design can really compensate for that after the fact.

As a hobbyist photographer who enjoys shooting in low-light and is frequently disappointed by focusing errors, I totally see the value in the concept of the Lytro (my most recent disappointment being unable to correctly focus the smoke in this shot and having to post-process to bring it out more, but still not well enough: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lusr/6830872670/).

Too bad they don't ship internationally yet, although I feel the current lack of manual controls for shutter speed and ISO (and the presumably lower-end sensor) for this first revision would probably be disappointing if I did order it.
I don't like this "Free" business.

It doesn't make sense and the complete lack of pricing info really puts me off.

So I play around with this, like it and choose to stick with it. They then introduce uncompetitive pricing.. I just wasted my time. They do not need to give exact pricing - they might not know at the moment - but they should at least give an overview of what they plan to do.

> We will keep this free plan for the foreseeable future. The free plan allows...

> This free plan will exist while we develop and test the service. As the service becomes stable we will be introducing paid plans and you will be asked to upgrade.

These 2 statements make sense to me. The fact they mention nothing about pricing on their site confuses and annoys me.
Facebook Files New S-1, Pricing $34-38 Per Share
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/15/facebook-files-new-s-1-pricing-34-38-per-share-adds-50-6m-shares-of-class-a-stock-raising-14-7b/
Further, if you happen do go and do a lot of damage with your car, make sure to also leave your car open so that you can say that it could have been someone else doing the damage.

I think deep down that is what the courts are afraid. They are afraid that cyber-crime will run rampant and they won't be able to earn their keep by prosecuting anyone because of altruistic individuals who wish to share their internet connection freely with the world. Then of course, the fear is that criminal will also open up their WiFi connections so as to provide a plausible deniability to their crimes.
Software Engineer: 2012's Top Job
Taking Care Of Yourself At A Startup
I would argue that in this case, the author is technically wrong with his argument.

You do not need to know the entire history of the foo object, only the intrinsic state and the arguments to the current method call to determine it's behaviour. This means that a method on an object can be modeled as add :: (foo, integer) -> integer.

That is not to say that this is necessarily easy, and yes, singletons do complicate this by making it difficult to know exactly what the intrinsic state of an object is as they essentially hold a reference to something which may be modified by something other than the foo object.

I fully agree that functional programming seems like a good idea right now, but I would also say that this particular problem is mainly due to the programmer failing to adequately control and rein in extra, unnecessary state.
Long ago I found an IBM 360 emulator written in 2 pages of APL and published in some technical magazine. Anyone recall this and have a copy? (I've found websites with copies of similar articles, but lacked the straight-up APL code.)
If you just bought a Mac in order to develop for iPhone then yes, you need to create an Apple ID and jump through all the hoops. Like if I wanted to run that aptitude command I would have to download, install Ubuntu and learn unix first.

But if you already are a mac user then you already have an Apple ID. It is absurd to say that you need it to download Xcode.
It's like trying to cut down on the amount of bad writing in the world. Sure, I guess aesthetically it'd be nice if I never had to look at any bad writing. But bad writing is part of the process of becoming a good writer, so there'd ultimately be less good writing out there.
More discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3472177
No, but then I don't think that Google is a basket of goodwill. Quite the contrary, actually.
and python 2.6 and PostgreSQL 8.4 and Perl 5.10. They definitely don't seem to be aiming for the "cutting edge" crowd.
Are there any scenarios where this would be preferable to virtualization?
Side note: small gray text on a white background... I hope my fellow bloggers know better than to do this.
I have a similar thought, where even simple programs allow use of the computer, rather than just the software available on it.
If you imply Werkzeug is not production-ready, can you please elaborate why?
I'm going to quote Zed Shaw in response to this article.
"Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."
If you read the page you'd see the second section titled "Finding an Amazon Locker Location"

has a link "Search for a Locker"

Also, the second section opens with:

Amazon Lockers are currently located in Seattle, New York, and London. If you live in Seattle or New York, you can search and select a locker location during the checkout process or in Your Account by following these steps below.

I'm not sure what your complaint is.

If you still don't understand, try reading the link.
Some Thoughts On Registration Rights
I wrote a Python web app on OpenShift (Tornado not Django) and really liked it. While I don't have experience with Heroku, I was really impressed with OpenShift.

However, be aware that not everything is enabled yet. I ran into problems when I discovered the multiprocessing package doesn't work (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=814991).
He's so naive it is adorable.
Allow me to introduce you to Glassboard 2.0
"Sourced" is what they call it now? So if I torrent a bunch of movies, at the lawsuit I can just say, "no I sourced those, 50% of all movies are scenes sourced from other movies," and it's fine, right?
Exactly my thoughts.

For me it was like reading: "Writing is not a basic skill; we have plenty of books out there. Most people, when they learn to write, start writing books that are of awful quality!"
BSD/MIT (and maybe Apache?): People can take your stuff and resell it.

GPL/LGPL: People can't take your stuff and use it in any way whatsoever without making what they make with it open source as well.

That may be a broad generalization, but it's mostly true.
Why Facebook may be the SMS killer we've been waiting for
"With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize."

I went through the first dot.com bubble - and I heard a lot of sentences like that. Not saying that Quora isn't valuable, or that it isn't possible to monetize, but the whole build-traffic-and-we'll-figure-it-out-later gives me 'Nam flashbacks.

I used to do a lot at Quora - but the more I thought about it, the more I figured that not getting paid for giving up my knowledge was a bad idea. I find it most useful for discussions/information on start-ups.

All being said, they have a lot of talented people working there and a lot of great data - someone will buy them if they can't figure out how to make it work financially.
I use bersirc. It's an old client, but it checks out. It's very simple to use.

You're not going to be able to use it to market a product, unless you're specifically targeting hackers or bearded system administrators.
FTFY

<imgset>
<img src="foo.jpg">
<img src="foo1.jpg" width="100">
<img src="foo2.jpg" density="2">
</imgset>
The Fastest-Dying Jobs of This Generation
Close: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_...
For those interested in symbolically manipulating [1] state machines (NFAs), pushdown automata (PDAs), and context-free grammars (CFGs), take a look at http://www.grailplus.org.

[1] http://www.ioreader.com/2011/03/15/pattern-matching-in-grail
Ozark Express Care
I would too, but

- To my knowledge, there are no sane C-based PDF renderers with a permissive BSD-like license

- Poppler renders to Cairo --- a _huge_ win because I don't actually have to do anything to convert Cairo surfaces to Racket's native drawing type

- I don't know / don't have the time to implement my own PDF reader/parser from scratch.
A skill set everyone: computational thinking
Well, I think both point are valid. You should learn to code as you learned to write, to be able to function in a modern society.

And another good reason for learning to code (just like learning to write) is that it'll let you reach a lot of people, and possibly become extremely rich in the process. I guess that second argument is what Jeff Atwood is mostly disagreeing with.
Not if you want to use port 80 for your websockets and http on the same server. We are using haproxy to support both Node and nginx on port 80.
No file format exists which supports this use case.
What is underestimated is what one could do with it.

Sure, 10GB fits in a usb stick today (or better, fits in a 3 year old one)

And managing the amount of data was certainly a challenge.

If you see the first Toy Story today you can think of that being rendered in real time by a modern graphic card easily.

But still, they had what was available and managed to do all kinds of tricks

Now see what they could do in 1984 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbPzyvResc
What's affordable to Silicon Valley software engineers is not affordable to the people who clean the bathrooms...work at Subway...morning mocha.

The time of those people is far less valuable than the time of the engineers. If someone needs to waste an hour commuting, it's much better for it to be the barista than the engineer.

It's certainly good for you that you get to occupy this apartment and prevent facebookers from moving in, but how does anyone else benefit? Is the coffee you produce somehow more valuable to society than a new facebook feature?
AKA learn to code; even if its Excel or DrScheme.
That animation is just a sales pitch for their cloud services.
Reading and writing are outright useful. Math you can get by without but it's important indirectly.

Same way being able to code is important indirectly.

With computers you learn how to express what you want precisely and unambiguously.

You can't hand wave computer into doing what you want. Learning how to be precise and how to not rely on other people guessing what you want is important skill and best way to learn it is to learn to code. You will need this skill in any managerial role.
Documenting a programming language: Reference Manual
Just to kick-off the conversation. The initial lecture model can be interesting for subjects where you typically listen to a "story" (history, biology, geography).

Do you think it works for applied subjects, or for the ones where it's more experiment oriented?

Would it do any good to move away from the "select an answer" testing into more interactive and complex exercise tools?
"Oops! Five CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired (Cisco, GE, WalMart, Sears, Microsoft)"

Surprised not to see Steven Elop of Nokia in the list.
Pretty uninteresting topic from Jeff. For other than professional programmers, it is like guitar.

While professional guitarists take years to master it, anyone can get an acoustic guitar and play 'Hotel California' as hobby.

What the hell is wrong here?
I agree that they should clarify the ToS.... but if you don't trust them, then you shouldn't use them no matter what the ToS says.
Samsung Galaxy S3 Vs Galaxy Note Gadgets
Part of the problem here is that there are a wide range of pixel densities. The server could choose to display the same image for some range of values but trying to get a caching proxy to sort this out is highly nontrivial.
Yes, I prefer flat-rate billing. It leaves me to be more flexible with my time, and I don't have to argue over my timelogs.

The only caveat is that you need to be explicit when you define the project. This is hard for a lot of developers, which is why they prefer hourly billing.

Every once in a while, you get really lucky, and something that you estimated 8 hours for takes 2, in which case you can split the difference with the client and:

1. Look like a hero.

2. Make a bit of extra change.
I'd add that corporate gigs for comedians usually involve them being fed a couple anecdotes about the company which they then incorporate into their bits. This guy used "there's no women in this field" poorly.
The problem with free stuff is the lack of support. If I mess something up and my site crashes after hitting the HN front page, I want someone to throw money at until things work again.
Commercialization makes your online rights irrelevant
Help needed: survey for startup idea
Hi, we are one of the teams following technology entrepreneurship class on venture-lab.org.

We are thinking at creating a service to generate throwaway email address when you don't want to give your real email address to avoid spam.

Kindly help to fill up this survey form.

Really appreciate your help.
Sales for Engineers
Really? That's the only way?
I wonder how many folks suggesting everyone should learn to code will replace a punctured car tire instead of plugging it.
Well, look at that! Thanks for the information.
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> I looked for maybe an hour with no luck.

1. On the Bing homepage, click "Help"

2. Click "Find Help for site owners"

Arrive at the answer to your question.
The Hierarchy of Innovation
Once a shutter speed has been selected you're pretty much stuck with it and I'm not sure any camera design can really compensate for that after the fact.

Imagine a camera that constantly records video at a very high frame rate. You can then "go back in time" to pick a moment, and the creative decision of choosing the shutter speed can be done at that point. Technically it's just a matter of blending a range of frames around your chosen moment (a fast shutter uses just a few frames, whereas a slow shutter would combine dozens of frames to create your image).
I always thought you died in snake because you ate yourself, not because you crashed into yourself.

I've actually been working on a similar game for a while. Email me if you want to chat about some ideas I've been tossing around.
The (very) uneven distribution of DNS root servers on the Internet
Also wanted to come here and say this, thanks for pointing it out.

It's like novelists novelists being afraid of people learning to write because then they'd take their jobs or scientists being afraid that people learnt physics, mathematics, cosmology...

One case I can think of... religious priests are sometimes afraid of people actually reading their religious books aren't they? :-P
Interview with Lakshman Prasad and Shabda Raaj, founders of Agiliq
It’s official: Facebook offers 50.6m extra shares, confirms new $34-$38 price
Upcoming Nike Air Max 2009 White Black Stealth Review
What’s the difference? One is just a more abstract definition of the other.
N900 is a completely different device, unrelated to N9.
Ouch, that's kind of a kick to the ego. I do kind of agree with the article... Ballmer is washed up and making Microsoft hurt for it.
Thanks, brilliant! Just what I was after =)