skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For free geo IP, this might work:

http://geoip.dmwtechnologies.com/
# `None` means `lambda x: x` here

I find it more helpful to think of it as meaning `bool` in that context. I think the None special case is only there because filter() predates bool() in Python.
Yeah, this is going to be interesting. I hope it takes hold, somewhere.
I agree with you that most business books are overrated. Although, for business advice, I have a lot of respect for anything harvard business review publishes.
It needs to get the point across without watching a video.
blink tag anyone?
Well, in the case of GCC/egcs and KHTML/WebKit, it's not quite a precise merge; egcs and WebKit won.
I, Nanny: Robot Babysitters Pose Dilemma
i think it's a bit hard on the eyes...

#F60 > #BE2828
I used to run into that roadblock before. I find that what you can do is look at the ideas you started with and what you have written and then make sure that all your points are sufficiently proven. There is almost always some finer detail you can elaborate on (for instance by adding an example or two) and if it doesn't quite fit, you can delegate it to end notes or foot notes.

Sometimes, it really is waste and you have to hit the deadline, but other times it can make your piece a lot more interesting.
The hiring process in general is outdated, if not broken. It is exactly the same (Resume to Interview) regardless of the type of job in question (Banker vs Developer vs Babysitter). Where is the customization?

As more and more work becomes digitally distributable thought-work, why aren’t we judging people based on relevant examples of their work? Why is an entry level hedgefund analyst judged by a 30 minute "tell me about yourself" interview as opposed to the performance of her personal account (and the verbalization of the rationale behind it)?

I think it is interesting that we just assume that "talking to someone" is the ultimate tool for determining intelligence, competence, and fit. Ultimately, talking to someone measures how well they can talk, not how well they perform. Are there more pertinent tools for assessment or will hiring always come down to how we "feel" about someone after a 30 minute interview?

(Good related post on interviewing by Eric Ries: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/abcdefs-of...)

Also, a provocative essay on "elite education" that is a good foil to Paul’s point about how elite education makes people feel about themselves. From this author’s perspective, it is a disadvantage. Get past the first four paragraphs and some ridiculous ivy-towerishness and I think he makes some good points):
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.htm...

Postscript: This is a tangential point related to measurement. I just spent a scholarship year interviewing entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to understand how they evaluate or measure the progress of early stage ventures before the standard financial metrics become available. Paul, would love to hear your thoughts given your unique position. Thanks.
HP Firebird 803 tower with VoodooDNA leaked
Hi there,

I'm the CTO of United Virtualities with our main production office (and myself) based in Buenos Aires.

There are some pretty neat tech companies in BA in the lookout for talent and you'll have a blast here as well.

Do contact me at llopatin@unitedvirtualities.com.
Twitter relaunches name search, still no tweet search on site
How about a nice green (#55af55)?
Lessig: It's Time to Demolish the FCC
So, I posted this on one of the threads for other blog posts about this, but that tread doesn't have much going on, and I want to see what people have to say about it:

I'm a merbist and think this will be good for both the Merb and Rails communities.

That said, I'm a little afraid it will shaft the other Ruby frameworks (Sinatra, Camping) and possibly straight ruby too. People might make interesting things only compatible with Rails.

When Merb was a pretty big, active minority, it was more compelling to go out of one's way to make interesting libraries (ORMs, gems, etc.) easily compatible with anything ruby.

Now, people might at the least write things specifically setup for use w/ rails in such a way that it's inconvenient to nonrails ruby, and at worst make Rails plugins for things that could be useful libraries for all of Ruby.

Rails is gaining modularity, but I fear Ruby overall might lose it. Even after Rails and Merb merge, rails!=ruby.
So what's everyone doing for Christmas?

I've Sinatra on loop on the living room speakers and I'll be waltzing with my lady for a few hours before we depart for a Christmas ski trip.
I didn't want to bloat an already long message, but I would think that there is at least the potential for a high-end market for fancy toilets. I was addressing the more wide-spread case. I don't think you're going to see that sort of thing become standard until a major shift occurs in American culture, or manufacturing just becomes so cheap that the extra cost for a fancy toilet (and quite likely a lot of other things) is so low nobody cares anymore. And I'd expect that second one to happen before the first.
Boxee opening up the alpha
how about florescent pink?
Maybe for next Christmas he can let us choose our own CSS theme :-D.
Actually, a more interesting question: What happens when a robot is a better nanny than a given (for the sake of argument, crappy) parent? And shortly thereafter, what happens when the robot is a better parent... for some powerful entity's definition of "better"?

Interesting times are coming at us fast!
The bike shed should definitely be blue.
Pretty cool, thanks.

Coincidentally... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408190
Thanks teej!! I really appreciate that, I just re-formatted.
I have this essay as a book in hard copy. Now that Neal has released it, if you don't already have it you should definitely read it.

It strangely continues to be true. Maybe because the concept he talks about pervade the makeup of the operating systems he discusses so much.
I think it would end up like this Monty Python Silly Job Interview Sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo

Not something I want to see when it's me/my life on the line, really. Take it seriously and talk sense, please.
Thanks. `bool` is more readable.

"\n".join(filter(bool, descriptions))

Or `len`

"\n".join(filter(len, descriptions))
More Readers Are Picking Up Electronic Books
This is awesome.

Merb has become the 'go to' framework for Rails developers like myself who are unsatisfied with several Rails design choices.

However, the technical differences between the two are actually not that big. A merge of Merb and Rails concepts sounds like a good thing, all 'round.

Three cheers for open-source development and civil relationships between developers.
This is informative. I had never heard of Rack before. It seems very similar to Python Paste. Neat.

However, I don't see what this has to do with my original comment. It doesn't address any of the concerns I raised about the john_dahl's comment. Specifically, I'm wondering how several competing web frameworks results in splintering of the Ruby community. Isn't competition good? Don't we want a variety of tools that meet different needs?

I frequently see Merb mentioned as an alternative to Rails in response to some gripe about Rails. Developers obviously have needs that aren't met by Rails. So my question is how is this merger a positive thing for developers? What's wrong with having several tools that are used for different scenarios? Of course, 100 competing web frameworks that are essentially all the same doesn't do anyone any good, but surely there's nothing wrong with several if they specialize in different areas.

john_dahl's comment essentially applauds the merger as a unification of the Ruby community and implies that it's a disadvantage to have competition. Is that really a good thing? Developers don't benefit one iota from having a "winner".
So which part implies Christian- the Hacker or the News? (I actually celebrate xmas....just sayin though)
The Abnormal Psychology of the Bernie Madoff Scandal | The Real Wolf of Wall Street
We really go all out for the holidays here at Hacker News.
We have not yet made any choices. Please contact me by e-mail if you have specific questions. nickbend@gmail.com
The day Paul Graham uses CSS is the day hell freezes over.
He has a subtler point:

While learning languages X and Y will make you a better programmer in the long term, due to the added perspective they give you, keep in mind that this experience doesn't necessarily apply immediately and directly to every language you work in - don't try to force alien idioms from your new language of fascination into your day-to-day work language, because it's probably a much greater stretch than you realize. It will instead make your code incredibly awkward for everybody else to maintain, actually making you a worse programmer. (This is my understanding, but speaking as someone who has been guilty of doing this in the past, it's really something to be mindful about.)
Ok, ok, it's a classic essay.

However, it's a classic. Not news.

Next thing you know there'll be a front-page article recommending "Godel, Escher, Bach", a trip through the Jargon file, a link to the Scary Devil Monastery group and, hey, did you read that thread where Linus gets into a flame-war with Tanenbaum?

Also, ED is the standard editor! Yeah!
never say never!
The official religion of Hacker News is FSM, but a reform sect that celebrates Christmas.
You can do that yourself for pretty much any site with the Stylish extension for Firefox, which lets you tweak CSS of websites you visit. It turns out to be surprisingly easy to write your own color scheme or whatever. I actually use my own for hacker news because the default one makes it hard to see the links on the front page that I've already clicked on. http://arvindn.livejournal.com/98803.html
Ahh, the nuclear power station has been approved then?

Fine, carry on!
Cool. Can we get some Django news now, please? :)
I was so confused when I landed on the homepage just now. I'm on my little brother's MacBook and thought his colors were off - then I put red + green together and the light went off. :)

It's been a long week.
I'm not even sure it's a sect: http://www.venganza.org/2008/12/23/happy-holidays-from-finla...
How long did it take you guys to get this up and running?
have you tried eating differently, or moving to the country side, does that help at all?
Haha yes, that's why I made the comment.

Regardless a choose your own table christmas adventure would be fine for next year.
http://ycombinator.com/news.css

(Braces used in a Lisp-style, naturally.)
Is today April 1st?
"""
After the Summize purchase, Twitter wrote on its blog:

We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to access search.twitter.com

That was July; we’re still waiting.
"""

He's still waiting for Twitter to put the search box in the header? Is it that hard to go to search.twitter.com? Bookmark it.

Look on the bright side, at least there is twitter search.
Visit http://palermovalley.com/ (the event is held once a month or two I believe)... it's useful for networking and full of entrepreneurs, developers and builders. The founders of Core, Popego, Sabarasa, etc. can be found there sometimes too.
It's not necessarily the "white space" or "less text" that is throwing me off, rather, it's the arrangement of boxes on the page.

If you're looking to loop in the entire family, I'd try to get the most important stuff above the fold somewhere (i.e. the awesome overview video you have). I've watched the way my parents use the web and interact on their screens, and the first thing they'll look at is something right in front of them - in your case, show them the overview video above the fold while keeping your core message. Example arrangement: http://www.campfirenow.com/?source=applist

My $.02 at first glance but looks/feels great!
I used to use Boxee and it was pretty nice but then I found Plex. Mac only though: http://www.plexapp.com/

Give both a try... see what you prefer.
Beautifully said. Elton John sings, "there's more to be seen than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done". As long as there are more things to discover, life is a proposition worth having.

Though, not to be a wet blanket, even the computers, trans-human intelligences, etc. won't be "immortal" in the sense of living forever. The universe herself will expand so much that her galaxies will all collapse into mega-black holes, which, over the eons, will decay via Hawking radiation, until there will be nothing at all anywhere except photons, at which point time itself will cease since there will be no material particles to measure it, time effectively becomes spacelike at that point.

But between now and that doubtful date, I do wish the transhumanists and their robot companions all the best of luck! :-)
Boxee is awesome if you've seen it in action. Too bad it won't run on my Powerbook... D:
(We're going to do a separate post on this in a few days probably, but here's a long story short)

Late October is when we started. Put together a spec doc. At first it was like two pages, we basically said: in order for this to be simple enough, we have to get it down to one page. The goal was simple sharing with your family, no bullshit involved.

Mark got a proof of concept up within 24 hours (layout, basic functionality, database,etc.) From there, we spent the rest of the time tweaking things, testing, user vids,etc.
haha, right on. I just ended an all out, all consuming project. I'm hoping to enjoy the finer things in life in Argentina. Hence, employment (not forever mind you :))
Study:  Give or take $5, people respond differently
Actually I'm not against CSS constructs. I'll use them when they're convenient. The problem is that saying this to CSS zealots is like saying to the ancient Hebrews that one will worship Yahweh along with all the other gods.
dtaylor and hhm, great links. thank you!
Very impressive. Hopefully you guys can shed light on how you worked long-distance, managing time, doing this as a "side project", etc.

It's certainly a great gift to share with friends and family this holiday season!
Egads. Next thing you know Apple and Microsoft will be merging OS X and Windows 7. After all, they're both trying to accomplish the same thing, right? ;-)

I don't use either framework, but this announcement saddens me in part because competition REALLY IS a good thing (that's my logical argument) and, to be honest, I would not have minded seeing DHH get served a slice of humble pie (that's my emotional argument).

That said, I have a new found admiration for DHH. He saw the writing on the wall and instead of just waiting for his macro-framework to become irrelevant, he chose to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft and "embrace and extend" Merb. Well done!
Google docs is good for some things, particularly working collaboratively on docs - but fall short on things like shared messages and to-do lists. Basecamp is just so easy, and the price is so low for a business that it is worth the 40$ a month.
I don't think the CPAN is as important to people that haven't used it as it is to people who have. Many programmers are used to reinventing the wheel poorly, either due to the "it's fun" factor, or the "we can't use external code" factor. In that case, the CPAN isn't much of a compelling feature, since they aren't going to be using its libraries anyway. ("I have to install a library to get a function that reads a file into a string? Fuck it, I'll write it myself.")

Try doing your next project in Perl, using the CPAN where appropriate, and you'll see that the standard libraries of Python, Java, Haskell, whatever are simply inadequate.

(In the end, it really depends on what you are doing. J2EE is probably fine for an web page that extracts some rows from a database. Most programming tasks are not that trivial, however, even if they should be.)
Either you can't delete or it's not obvious how to delete posted stuff. That's an incredibly huge oversight IMHO.
Brand New: Best & Worst Logos of 2008
ho passato molto tempo en italia, ma non sono italiano. sei italiano?
All celebrate the noodly appendage.
Sounds like how we are with funding.
Xmas at YHacker... 
I just noticed the pretty colors. Thanks for the holiday spirit PG!
My one escape from the computer has been Tango... and as the Tango capital of the world, Argentina is killer. Besides, I'm going to take the first month or so and take intensive Spanish classes. Living in the mission district, my barber never understands how to cut my hair :)

If you go down, look me up. I may still be down there. Email: joseph dot walla at gmail dot com
completely agree. It'll be there soon by the time we do a more widespread launch. We'll make it so you can only delete your own stuff obviously.
Let me suggest "The Road Ahead" by Bill Gates. It was one of the first computer/software related books I ever read, and I think it is a classic in the field of software business kind of reads. It is accessible by anyone, even non-techie types, and its vision remains important for understanding where we are heading.

If anyone here might remember, in 90210, Steve Sanders' father gives this book to him as a graduation present. That in itself should be endorsement enough!
Moving from San Francisco, CA.

I hear ya. I'm actually just looking to be cash flow neutral where I'm there. No need to make it big. Just keep me going.
Actually, the terminology is a little different for financial firms than private traders.

Say that you take out a mortgage on a new house. The bank lets you borrow up to a certain percentage of the house's value, say 90%. The other 10% is a down payment that you must meet with your own money.

Now lets say the value of your house falls from $100,000 to $90,000. The way your mortgage is written, you probably still owe the bank $90,000 (90% of the original purchase price). However, the way debt contracts are written in the financial world, you would have to PAY the bank $9,000 to reduce your total borrowing to 90% of the CURRENT value of the property, or $81,000. That $9,000 payment is a "margin call" in financial market terminology.

So, financial firms borrow up to a certain amount of the assets that they lend, say 90%. If the value of those assets drops in half, and the value of mortgages plummeted on the open market, they owe their lenders enormous sums (45% of the value of the assets, for a 50% drop in value on 90% leverage).

Those margin calls forced a lot of firms out of business, even though their assets were still performing and still paying enough to meet their debt payments and operating expenses. If the firms could call their mortgages, they would be fine, but they can't because the mortgage money is spent on a house which is a non-liquid asset. The financial firms likely thought that their assets were undervalued on the market because of the panic that set in, but no matter. That's not the way their contracts were written.
So, some other thoughts along the "aha" factor on the page:

For, the "Why Use Ramamia?" section alongside the video, there are some points here that don't fit IMO:

"Get started for free in under 5 seconds" - That's not a reason to use the app. I wouldn't place this in the why section.

"Easily share photos, events, messages, and interesting links" - How? Can you tell me how in one a line point?

"10x easier to use than other family sites" - Again, how? Also, what's a "family" site in this sense?

"More private than using Facebook or MySpace" - Just covering all areas here, but do you think your target audience will know FB and MS well enough to showcase it here in this point?

"Add something and your entire family is updated" - Maybe say "anything" instead of "something" here. "Add ANYTHING and your entire family is updated IMMEDIATELY"?
"On December 23rd, we decided to end the duplication and the paradox of choice."

Let's be clear about one thing: They didn't eliminate "the paradox of choice," they eliminated "choice." The Paradox of Choice comes into play when there are so many choices that people have difficulty making a choice at all -- like 23 varieties of white bread. The Paradox of Choice does not come into play when there are two choices. But I guess this was destined to happen because eliminating choice has been the philosophy of the Rails team all along.

BTW, the book "The Paradox of Choice" is a great read and every hacker should read it. And the best part is that you don't even have to read it all the way to the end to 'get it.'

http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...

(Yes, this is my second rant on this topic. I will shut up now).
I have been dealing with dyslexia all my life. I tend to make a lot of spelling errors and editing my own work is particularity difficult, because I read what I think I see so "My god's namme is Rex" reads "My dog's name is Rex". The best tools at my disposal are:
- a text to speech reader
- spell check
- a thesaurus (The spell check suggestions are hard to tell apart )
CSS is pretty much universally a superior way to manage your page styling, which is why us "CSS Zealots" have that attitude.
AdultFriendFinder has filed for an IPO
That's silly. All of the auto industry's money is in the middle. Civics, Corollas, Accords, and their competitors. Americans innovate around the fringe in sports cars too. And luxury. They had a hell of a run (albeit brief) with Hummers. Escalades. Mustangs. Etc.

It's just not an innovation problem. It's a cost basis problem.
100% correct. We'll revamp them completely. Much thanks for putting that into perspective.
Very helpful.

You mind if I ping you when I get down there? It'd be great to compare notes.
Oh no...here we go again.
Thanks for the reply! I just emailed you.
Well remember you can buy as many books as you'd like but they're no use if you don't read them ;)

Save that money for a cup of coffee or something.
Who knows; maybe we'll find a way out, or into a "next" universe, like Tau Zero.
The amount of hate in the comments on that page is really surprising; I just don't understand it.
Ford Fusion Hybrid Is Rated at 41 M.P.G
I'm not a Ruby guy, so I may be completely off here, but it struck me as kind of inaccurate to describe Merb as "an alternative Rails stack"...I thought Merb was an alternative to the Rails stack?
I think Chile is a better option. Much more capitalist oriented government. Income tax is at just over 40% though but there are lots of jobs, lots of activity, and the government is pro-immigration. Especially if you have technical skills.

Also Chile has huge Lithium deposits and could become Saudi Arabia of Lithium if these new electric cars work out. Get your citizenship early. Before everyone starts moving there.

After a year of Mr. O this country's entrepreneurs are probably going to be bailing out and the place could get real crowded.
It's not a disadvantage, it's a massive disadvantage. It's impossible to stay $2,000 ahead of your competition unless your competition is retarded. Toyota and Honda are not retarded.

So we can either wait for them to become retarded (which they may if all of the American car companies vanish) or we can lower our cost-basis and compete on a level playing field.
The argument the article makes is, literally, "Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn't matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different."

You are arguing that "there are millions of ideas that keep sucking even when modified."

He's saying, yes, your INITIAL idea may suck, but any successful businesses created with it would likely not be the same idea, so it doesn't really matter to wait until getting a perfect idea, and here are some examples. So don't be afraid to start! If you succeed, it won't be with that idea, very likely! And it may take years of time! And it won't necessarily be the very next iteration of the idea that changes everything.

The author is not saying you will succeed for sure, or that changing one's idea is the most important factor (both are essential to your argument, but it's not what he's saying, on the other hand.)