skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started out with dark backgrounds because of vim + Linux. The default terminal was black. Now I use the dark background w/ color text for all my editors/IDEs.

I tried switching to the white background for a week, but it really hurt my eyes. I had to switch back after a few days.
what do you do if you dont have an OpenID account? (like me)
All of the big silicon valley companies claim to be "flat." When I started at Yahoo!, all I heard about was how flat the organization was. Doesn't mean it's true.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit
That's a good point. Is it possible to hire a LISP programmer for those conditions? Where? Not even in India I'd wager, esp. when Tata will hire anyone, for more money/fewer hours, and give them a benefits package too.
If you're typing for a only few minutes then type QWERTY looking at the keys.
There was an interesting blog posting a while back about life at google from a "microsoftie" perspective:

http://no2google.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/life-at-google-the...
haha. we had a pretty raucous "tie day" email thread at work once. everyone kept posting pictures of people wearing ties, or tye dyes, or colonel tigh, etc. lots of good fun, but definitely consuming way too much time and enjoyment to be productive.

finally the ceo stepped in to put an end to, though two higher ups still came back with even witty tie day references.

the joyfulness of that discussion brings a smile to my face.
Check out the login page: http://zend.usetrackthis.com/session/login

You can use your Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, MySpace or any OpenID (Wordpress, Blogger, etc). I'd imagine most people have at least one of those accounts.
As Einstein and many others have shown, we can reason correctly about the world without physical experimentation, you smug twit. I'm not Einstein, but then keyboard layouts aren't general relativity.
Tell you what, though. If you want to sell this thing, what I'd do is, develop it and open source it:

* Enterprises will pay money for open source products. In fact, it's easier for them to pay for open source than to deploy it for free.

* IT people will bring open source stuff in house to play with it, which makes them your shadow sales force.

* It's really easy to qualify accounts for sales; just have an inside sales guy call up and ask if they use your OSS project and like it.
I don't understand, why does it matter?
No it's not. Snopes just doesn't know how to do a literature search for anything that hasn't been written in English and more recently than 1997.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Hr0aAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA300&#...
Once you switch, your fingers should still retain some of the muscle memory. Mine have, though I can't type as quickly.
It seems to have helped my typing speed too. On a typing program, I timed my top QWERTY speed at 78. This is after learning to touch type when I was about 10, and now I'm in my 20s. Then I switched, and after a year or so, my top Dvorak speed passed 100. That being said, I practiced my typing a lot more with Dvorak.
i'm not convinced you have to choose between making something lovable and making something less annoying. just because people put up with annoying features of something they love does not mean they love the product because it is annoying. it just happens to not be perfect.

or maybe the implication is that the things that some people love, many others will find annoying.

are there not things that many people love and are not annoying to many more? it sounds like semantics to me.

i can't think of any technology that i love--that's just not how i am. i do love doing joyful things, like feeling empowered and useful, which i get from open source and python. most of the things i love are playing goofy sports outside, which i suspect is something i share with far more people than something related to technology. perhaps this is a shortcoming of technical perspectives?
The way the ad is written, I half-expected it to demand that you pay them for the privilege.
This reminds me of http://www.scq.ubc.ca/order-of-the-science-scouts-of-exempla...
Obviously a-priori is obliquely making the point that BitTorrent is mostly used for copyright infringement.
I acknowledge the validity of the concerns you're bringing up here.

I've just started thinking about this a few months ago and I haven't spent any time trying to actually implement my ideas yet, so there are indeed quite a few issues I haven't explored very deep or indeed not at all.

I had thought a bit about the potential rigidity tradeoffs of correctness VS usability. I hadn't really thought about going so far as enforcing function signatures, though it's the logical next step after enforcing s-expression validity.

There are lots of different types of "structure errors" and I think some should be strictly enforced while others shouldn't. In the s-expression case, one example of something that should be enforced strictly is the nesting of parentheses that delimit s-expressions. Fortunately that one is pretty easy. Wereas in a traditional editor you'd do:

(|
()|
(|)

as 3 different steps, in a structure editor you'll simply have one operation that will do all this atomically so you go from one correct state to the next. In the function arity case, I think a much more lax enforcement is de rigueur. There will always be some editing tasks that will require less rigid rules but I think we should value correctness by default and then introduce laxity in controlled ways where it makes sense. It's a tradeoff similar to how limiting side-effects by default is a restriction that can make a program more powerful, yet sometimes you really want to have some mutable state.

edit: I'd add that my end goal for a structure editor is that it may better assist the user in his editing tasks by having a better understanding of the context. The validity enforcement is only a means to facilitate this and should be relaxed wherever it impedes the user rather than helping.
Rabbits and warrens (RabbitMQ + python overview)
I agree. Very clever, but I don't particularly understand why they chose a cat for open source projects. Someone care to fill me in?
As a long time Engine Yard customer I can say $129 is a very good deal considering the level of support that brings you. We've run PMOG (http://pmog.com) on EngineYard from a small starting slice right up to a real application and I've found them to consistently be responsive, knowledgable and scale-able, if you see what I mean :)

I'd strongly recommend anyone checkout EY solo. Hearing about their plans flex, the ability to run with passenger and soon rack, should make you realise that they know how to handle Ruby.
Coding for $11/hour is foolish, period. Seriously, that's way undervaluing the skill!
"Hi, we are setting ourselves up to fail, and are looking for people inexperienced in something difficult. Can you help? There's a good chance we won't pay you at all, btw"
There was enough of interest in the post - about the inherent brokenness of social news - to make it worth upvoting without paying attention to the "HN sucks."

That Garfield submission on the front page, OTOH...
I've got to put a vote in for white backgrounds. I find dark background terribly hard to read, especially with colored text. White backgrounds have a higher contrast with the text. I also turn the brightness down on my monitors, so I don't feel it's too blinding.

I also can't stand it if the syntax highlighting is too colorful. I like some coloring for reserved words, type names, comments, and string literals. Other than that black on white.

What I find more important that color schemes is having a nice font. If you're on Windows, and not using Consolas, you're missing out big time. Consolas is actually designed to look good with sub-pixel rendering. If you can't use Consolas, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is a nice second.
I think it's useful, it reminds me of http://www.visualjquery.com/.

The cascade-on-select on langref seems a little clunkier.
Right, just like I said.... academic gobbleddy gook.
I worked in MS for 10 years and still work here and I think it can be a great place to work, with one caveat - it depends on the group. Microsoft is not a monolith and different groups have different managers, different cultures (values and expertise among peers), different customers, different business and are in different stages (e.g. mature product, young product, life support etc). Most discussions about life at Microsoft are bound to be characteristic of small number of groups and not necesarily representative.

The benefits are mostly the same across the board, and you can get those at glassdoor: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.h...
Slashdot already does something like that - rationing mod points. OTOH, slashdot also disproves his idea that social news (if slashdot can be called that) declines as a function of time. Today's slashdotters are a lot smarter than Diggers or redditors.
Here's some insight into the poster in his/her own words:

"Frankly, if you knew me you might not like me because I'm as demanding as the job I have advertised is fascinating. In other words, I'm extremely demanding. I'm looking for an extremely clever developer who is ravenous for designing and developing great software.

Finally, I'm looking for talent; experience means virtually nothing to me whatsoever."

http://www.getafreelancer.com/pmb/mb366601.html#view
Nice, but a lot of what's described came from later work by Lyapunov, Onsager, and Prigogine.
If it did matter, what would we learn by comparing .NET books w/ Rails books, or Seaside books with Django books. Surely the number of books isn't the point.
Yes, maybe after a market crisis more people look for security, but I think that over time they forget the last crises and move back to chasing returns until it gets bad enough for the next crises to occur.
Agreed! To quote Richard Branson: pick on someone bigger than you.
Lay off the caps lock and excessive punctuation, no need to yell around here.
Invisibility-Cloak Breakthrough: software has enabled metamaterials to work with a broad band of freqs
Rands: The Larry Test
I think sitting in the NOC watching screens and responding to the odd alert might be, but 2nd and 3rd line SAs (and DBAs) are working at at least as hard as the programmers (in fact to borrow an old IBM-ism are "systems programmers").
I can't say much for full time employees, but I've heard the exact opposite for interns. The Google interns I've spoken with all said Google was their best offer as far as compensation goes.
A point well illustrated by this particular book from the Rails list: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470374950/pushcx-20/...
North Korea Says It Has ‘Weaponized’ Plutonium
Thank for pointing that out. From your Google Books links:

How great the just perceptible change can be made to become by making the rate of change extremely slow is a matter that still remains for investigation. It is worthy of note that it has been found possible in 5.25 hours to crush a frog's foot, without a sign that the pressure was felt, by screwing down a button at the rate of 0.03 mm per minute. A similar experiment showed that a live frog can actually be boiled without a movement if the water is heated slowly enough; in one experiment the temperature was raised at the rate of 0.002 Celsius per second, and the frog was found dead at the end of 2.5 hours without having moved.(1) If a frog can be crushed or boiled without any evidence that he has noticed it, it is at least an interesting question of what can be accomplished in this direction with human beings.

(1) The literature on these experiments with frogs includes Heinzmann, Euber die Wirkung sehr allmaliger Aenderungen thermischer Reize auf die Empfindungsnerven, "Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol." (Pfluger), 1872, vi. 222. Fratscher, Euber continuirliche und langsame Nervenreizung, "Jenaische Zeitschrift," 1875, N. F. ii. 130. Sedgwick, On the Variation of Reflex Excitability in the Frog induced by changes of Temperature, "Stud. Biol. Lab., Johns Hopkins Univ.," 1882, 385.
Read My Tweets provides an incentive for people to read each other's tweets.
Clearly I am also making a mistake by not using Visual Basic.
This is definitely interesting:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/users/feedback_218576.html

Looking through some of those, it seems the target audience is Eastern Europeans, not Indians.
It's good to see someone who has seen as much of the business world and thereby human nature as Fred still maintain a sense of idealism and duty to do the right thing. Unfortunately, most people are not like him and the pigs will be lining up at the trough for their cut. It sucks but that is the world we live in.
Benefits are value received. The value that I get from a home computer do not depend on how little time it spends in its idle loop (or even turned on). The value also doesn't necessarily depend on how often I use it. (A home defibrillator is extremely valuable even if it's only used once, and fairly valuable even if it's never used.)
Lispers seem to be a breed of uber-nerds (super nerds) who are extremely clever in some ways but utterly foolish in others. Lisp is an excellent language for developing software but generally we find Lispers to be arrogant, annoying, and not worth dealing with.

Therefore, if you are a Lisper, unless you are an unusual Lisper, please don't apply for this job. Instead, please go back to commiserate with your fellow Lispers about how hardly any Lisp jobs exist. Ok?

"Applicant must not have a chip on his shoulder, because this would draw attention to the plank that is on mine. "
The best I could do is this, and the tip of the arrow is dislocated: http://screencast.com/t/AWBzNtwG

Yes, I've seen the pictures-as-controls suggestion. Maybe I should try it more, but it seems like won't be able to create my own controls with text fields and other parameters etc.
The people I know directly also got Google offers as good or better than anything else - keeping in mind this was 2+ years ago.
Same experience here. I start having difficulty coding when the background is too bright, or even when the text is too bright on a black background (I had the text be a light gray for nearly a year, and I never really realized it wasn't white. Then when I looked at white on black code, it looked very bright and unpleasant to read.)
In the spirit of the article, I prove that Jesus is better than Rails, because there are 779 times more books about him.

Jesus books (333,560): http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1232312844/ref=sr_nr_i_0?ie=UTF8...

Rails books (428): http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstrip...
It's the GitHub.com logo. And it's an Octocat ;)
That's funny, in the beginning the Rails people used to brag how you only needed one book and would show this picture:

http://i44.tinypic.com/98uhs6.png

Now it looks like they turned into Java?
I thought this was an article about test subjects who very strangely called the scientists Mom or Dad when they came in for a study.
Besides the "easy on the eyes" feel of a dark background, I also love (in Textmate) using a tinge of transparency (opacity at 96%). It's really handy when you're trying to reference things in other windows and aren't sure if you formatted it exactly right. I think with a white background that would really look bad and easily distract.
I don't understand the motivation behind this at all. Why does anyone want people to read their tweets unless they are truly interested in reading the tweets?
But not everyone. I don't have any of them.
How can people be truly interested in reading your tweets if they have never even heard of you?

This is a new way to advertise.
Is there a list of all programming languages ever made?
You know from Lisp to Python to Javascript to C#. A complete list of every single language out there
First of all, most of them don't. A lot of them consult or run businesses on the side.

Second, it's the moneymen in administration who decided to run academia as a business, destroying it. The moneymen in charge of the universities have managed to jack tuition up 7% per year while cutting tenure-track professorships to such a degree that academia is no longer a viable career.

In general, I think professors object to 1950s-style hierarchical corporations, which are inhospitable environments for intelligent, creative people. And they object to the moneymen who are ruining their lives, and gutting academia, for the very-short-term benefit of the university profit margins (never mind that they're supposed to be non-profit). I don't think, by and large, they have any opposition to their students going to work at startups.
I don't get it. Why would I spend time reading random tweets? I suspect that vast majority of tweets sent are of no interest to me whatsoever.

The reading comprehension check seems unhelpful. For instance the tweet from you on the home page could very easily be missing the word "tweets" after "people's", or not. Removing random words also would make a number of tweets be much less comprehensible and hence even more of a waste of time to read.

I find the design unhelpful. The signup instructions are too small, and all in one line. I didn't see them for a while. What are trending topics? Why can't I do the action without signing up? Just let me know that it doesn't count for anything, but let me try it to see if I'm interested, especially since you have it there in the middle of the page with the clickable links.

Your msg= parameter, used for the too small error messages at the top, is vulnerable to XSS attacks:

http://www.readmytweets.com/?msg=%3CSCRIPT%3Ealert(%22XSS%22...
Unlike sugar-rich foods, though, potatoes don't contain many calories for how filling they are.

That's the problem with nutrition science as it is currently practiced (or rather, as it is currently used by non-scientists). Its conclusions are valuable to specialists, but it's not good enough (yet) to give much valuable advice regarding how people should actually eat. For example, according to the glycemic index, ice cream is better for you than potatoes, which is absurd.

Here's a good essay about this: http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=87
Yes, it's as fake as those PTC sites like http://bux.to.
You can read tweets on any topic. So it doesn't have to be completely random.

The reading comprehension check is not perfect, but you could always skip to the next tweet and everyone is in the same boat anyway.
Perhaps its time for a new CEO at Microsoft.
This is understandable of course. Go to any nonprofit or charity, and I'm sure that most workers there will justify their job choice as humanitarian, compared to for-profits. Academia is similar.

In reality though, many professors (particularly in engineering and CS) think highly of industry (most students end up there), and many professors have even started companies of their own.

To view students as impressionable is doing them a disservice. Students are free-thinking adults. To consider that "liberal" professors (whose political stance rarely if at all enters the classroom) could drastically affect their views is absurd.
Philip Greenspun on Scheme Vs. Common Lisp
Anyone know about something like Gang of Five in the bay area?

http://www.gangof5.net/
Sent to your email address. (I don't share that kind of thing on message boards, because some people don't want to know.)
Alright, I'm a Rails developer, but I don't understand why Rails is better than Django because it has more books written about it.

Is it because Rails is popular and emits a lot more noise than Django? Yeah, probably.
Well, the article says:

I’ll write about why this matters tomorrow.

Tune in tomorrow!

All I can figure is that either (a) Java and/or PHP are about to declare "victory" again, whatever that means, or (b) it will be concluded that the framework with the smallest number of books is superior because the docs are DRYer than everybody else's docs. Which might well be another moral victory for some obscure Lisp dialect.

I'm holding out for option (c): A collectible card game in which teams of software books are assembled to fight holy wars against each other. SICP, I choose you!
Thanks for pointing this out. I suspect there may be something genuinely broken with my downvoting, though, because despite having only upvoted for a good while, my downvotes continue to not count.

Alternatively, HN is keeping a backlog of my uncounted downvotes, and counting them in order as I make more upvotes. Thus, as long as there's a backlog, any new downvote I make will initially not count.

Personally, I think the >=0 net karma rule goes too far. I've tended to downvote more than I upvote because I drift towards policing behavior (not "grumpness": not all people who downvote more than they upvote can be classified as grumps, which is a highly subjective notion anyway), and generally have high standards for what I consider worthy of an upvote. Social moderation systems have to account for the variety of sociological roles. Not to mention, the net karma of the site may be negative, but a >=0 rule will never allow this state to be represented.

It is also impossible to determine what my net karma contribution is, and thus that the >=0 rule is even in effect. Net karma contribution should appear on a user's profile page, or at the top menu bar. I shouldn't be expected to track my karma contribution manually.
Explain what your service does on the website, please. And look at your design compared to most 2.0 designs, it looks retro-1999.
Meh... gives me the 'register to see the article' screen...
If by topic you mean I can select on a word that shows up anywhere in the tweet. I just entered "Java" and got this:

"A lady here at starbucks has brought her own home made java jacket to keep the warmth off her hands and in her cup."

Which is a total waste of my time. I can't even skip it without logging in, and I can't login with following you, which, no offense, isn't something I want to do.

I don't mean to be overly negative, but personally I don't get the appeal of this at all. Perhaps others will.
Lycos Mail, Tripod Death--Not So Fast
My post was tongue-in-cheek... thanks anyway, though!
Do you know of any meeting groups around here? I'd love to meet a few fellow HNers.
I think the article misses the point of Captcha's, and I think he's incorrect in his conclusion because of that. The point of captcha's isn't that they are unbreakable, the point is that you want to raise the transaction cost above zero for creating a new account.

Spammers rely on massive accounts/contacts and get a very small return. Let's say you need to send out ten million e-mails to get a single response, and maybe you can get ten thousand e-mails out of an account before it's banned. If the cost of creating a new account is zero, or limited by zero, then it doesn't matter if you have to create 10, 20, 100, or even 1,000 new accounts to get the e-mails out so you can get one response and make a 5 dollar commission. If you can automate that hell out of it, who cares.

On the other hand if it costs you 5 cents to break every captcha, those costs really add up in the aggregate, but the transaction cost is so low for a single use that it really is almost inconsequential.

So as with all security, it's not about making it "unbreakable", it's about raising the transaction cost high enough to make it less attractive or even unprofitable to circumvent it.
You can follow readmytweets temporarily just to get your password as a direct message.
Why can't I just register normally?
No. No list contains the languages that I developed, implemented and used in anger for analyses of certain mathematical structures.

More helpfully, Google is your friend:

http://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+all+programming+langu...

Here are some results taken with minimal checking. Did you try Google? What research did you do before asking the question?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

http://www.scriptol.org/alphabetical-programming-language-li...

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/List-of-programming...

http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/lang-list.h...