skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paul says,
"There's an even better way to block the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units"

this very aptly describes "small-world Networks" which are ubiquitous in societal/biological/information centric complex systems.

It's the tribe reflected in the organization of smallworld networks: many small, high clustered groups working together, yet connected to any random person in any given subgroup within 6 degrees of separation or less.

How? The distance between any two separate nodes ("people") is much lower on average than you'd think, mostly because of "shortcuts" or giant hubs in the network to which two distant regions can both connect. This is a huge advantage, because the increased information throughput becomes so much greater, bringing great opportunities. (For example, when you desperately need a date for the prom, you ask the girl with the most friends on Facebook to set you up.)

with the internet's advent, the most gigantic hub in history now offers the possibility of a "perfect ad-hoc group", be it a tribe of hackers building an experimental project, a band of economic analysts parsing through financial data, or any group of like-minded people engaged in any endeavour.

What i'm saying is, exponential growth of smaller groups isboth dynamically driving AND benefiting from the spread of the Internet. So... it is inevitable.

How do we deal with this?
> or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing

If the major ISPs cared about their customers this wouldn't be happening to begin with.
ruby syntax can be a little confusing. e.g. you can usually leave out parenthesis, but not always, and sometimes you get warnings but it works anyway.
Officially unlocked iPhone is so much over-priced ($1000) that nobody bothers to buy it. At least here in Russia.
to be successful one has to work hard and think. the trick is that anyone can do it.

XYZ always seemed complex and unmakable to me. After making XYZ it seemed like the simplest thing in the world. After a while more and more things were makable.

The courage to get on the 'success' path of working and doing oftens means getting over the "but i'm just a faker" mind-block. If it helps you to think that "everyone is faking it", fine. Just get on with it :-)
tRY LAYING OFF THE CAPS LOCK.
Well with any language you have to teach a little bit of convention to go along with the rules, and the convention on when to use parens in ruby is mostly standardized from the code I see.

But yeah, I'm sure there has to be a better language for learning out there, I just don't personally know it. I originally learned with C++, and I remember the terror that were pointers at first. When I had a class that taught me Scheme, I remember thinking: "hey, I could write this code on paper without even testing it out if I wanted", which was the polar opposite of my C++ experience.
I just tried the same query he has in the screenshot - no ads in the suggest box. Same with a bunch of other queries that I thought would likely come with ads.
Generally speaking venture capitalists fund companies that can either be acquired for a substantial sum, or that can go public. I don't know of any law firms that have gone public, nor law firms that have been funded by VC's.
The first thing a psychedelic experience will teach you is the absurdity of such a question.

Edit: Genuinely surprised to see that nobody else has mentioned the psychedelic experience in their search for a solution to satisfy this line of questioning.
This really has nothing to do with Java, except it happens to be the language he's teaching. A more accurate title would be 'Programming in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."' as it would be equally applicable to any programming language.
i remember another student complaining to the teacher, "so you're not giving me credit because i'm missing a for loop?"

i wish i was the teacher. i would have explained that "missing a for loop" isn't something like, say, having an injured arm. it's more like having an arm that was recently sawed off and is spraying and pouring copious amounts of blood all over the place

you have to be strict in those cases I think. programming requires precision, and if a person can't muster it then they shouldn't be fooled into thinking it's something they can major in, because then their time will just be wasted
It's interesting to look at Maddox's iPhone/Nokia E370 comparison table now that the App Store has been around for a while.
how does one think without language? We all have an inner self speaking in one language or another, but what if we had no knowledge of any language?

When you cross the street, do you narrate the situation to yourself ("One car approaching at about 25 miles per hour, currently two hundred feet away, decelerating at...") or do you model them visually?
Will the Recession Kill Web 2.0?
"Progressed" is not the right word. They changed more to adapt to their environment. Or, at least, they changed more genetically.
My university started the introductory course (for all majors, courses were common for the first 2 years) with scheme and most student seemed to understand it fairly well. We still had the 20% that were extremely fast because of having programming experience before (but learning scheme was a nice change compared to what they used to do) but the numbers of students completely lost seemed rather small.

So I think scheme is a very good choice for an introductory course...

Ruby is very nice (I'm mainly programming in it nowadays) but I'm not sure it's such a good choice for beginners, there are a lot of small details that could trip up beginners I think (block vs procs vs lambda vs method(:name_of_method), the eigenclass...)
You can customize the behaviour of Python objects in ways which may allow you to implement DSLs (for example, by responding to arbitrary messages, or by constructing callables).

A good example to look at might be https://storm.canonical.com/ which utilizes every trick in the book to allows you to write SQL-like queries in Python.
Terrorism? It's the internet, not an oil pipeline.

Did that word ever hold any meaning at all?
I don't know, look to your interests & read to some depth. I happen to like chinese so I'm trying to learn the language as I read about the culture.
Yep, I have an Aeron at work and an $80 (from Sam's Club) "Office Star Matrex Meshback" or something goofy name like that at home. I use both regularly and have no preference between the two. I would think a startup that needs the meager funding ycombinator deals in would be crazy to blow it on an Aeron.
I'm in Jordan, one of the countries serviced by the Sea Me lines (though for some odd reason it's not listed in the reports online), and several hours I called my ISP to complain about < dial-up rates on my 2mbps ADSL line. They told me that the telcom company had informed them of cut lines in the Aqaba region, and that they were re-routing traffic as we spoke.

Net speeds are back to normal now, though response times are still a bit off.
I actually do use Excel a lot to edit a lot of these things and don't think I could improve my productivity in any of them more than 10 or 20%.

Things that emacs can do for most of the languages in that list (after you install some appropriate emacs modules) that I doubt Excel can do very easily:

Syntax highlighting (the emacs term is "font-lock"). Auto-indentation based on language syntax. Auto-completion of symbols based on the contents of open files (if you've defined a constant "MECHFISH" in a file, and you type "MEC" in another file and press a keystroke, the system fills in "MECHFISH". Press the keystroke multiple times to scroll through multiple possibilities.) Snippets (type "func" and press Tab; your editor inserts the skeleton of a function definition for you). Integration with your version control system (git, in my case). Navigate from one of two dozen open files to another without moving your hands from the keyboard. Browse directory trees in panes, picking out files for editing -- or run a shell command across a bunch of selected files. Search-and-replace using regular expressions. Recursive grep through directory trees (I use emacs igrep-mode for this.)

This is by no means an exhaustive list. So suffice it to say that if you can't get more than a 10% "productivity" improvement by swapping emacs for Excel, you must be one hell of an Excel power user!

Incidentally, don't spend too much time bouncing from vim to emacs to TextMate. These editors take time to learn. Pick one and focus on it. Read some blogs and some wikis. Get really good at your editor of choice.
http://images.google.com/images?q=veterinary%20gloves&um...

Very related:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=114759...
I don't see how it could do anything but complicate it.
Ask HN: Places to see in Netherlands ?
I am visiting Netherlands for next two months on business trip. What are the Places I can see in the weekends?
NYT, WaPo, and even CNN have considerably more class and integrity than CNet, IMHO -- and outside the media world, there are many organizations of 2000+ people I have more respect for.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I must say that Python fits the bill.
I am 10x more productive developing Java using IntelliJ IDEA versus anything else :-)
Except that this is a pretty common practice: at most reputable schools, if you can demonstrate you don't need to take an introductory programming class, you can switch to a more advanced class.
Start with digital logic and machine architecture, work your way up.
Bill Gates managed to walk into IBM, tell them that Microsoft had an operating system to sell, retained ownership and received royalties on said software, yet didn’t once give away that he had nothing. That’s right, he didn’t have a single line of code to offer up on the chopping block. This feat lead to one of the greatest wealths in history.

This is totally wrong. This is the part taken from "Pirates of Silicon Valley", that movie was a work of fiction. IBM always knew Gates was buying QDOS from Tim Patterson of Seattle Computers. It is just that IBM couldn't strike a deal with Tim Patterson for QDOS or Gary Kildall for CP/M. Gates comes into picture, assures IBM that he would buy the OS from Seattle Computers, improve it and license it to IBM for a low fees. IBM didn't have any problems with that, as they never saw software as an integral part of a computer (They were all hardware companies).
but I have recently fell in love with jazz fusion. Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Tribel Tech, etc...

Amen. Pandora...machine learning gone right.
I think he/she was more criticizing that you effectively said "X, Y and Z are vital" and then "But X, Y and Z are not vital."

If you'd said "useful" instead of "vital" it'd have been fine logically, but "vital" implies necessity.
This is nothing like that since its not a publicly-available domain (with ties to the govt. no less), but a private username.

If I held a party at my house where I gave out unique nametags, the Celtics wouldn't have the right over the one that said "celtics" on it.
I was an early user of Pandora and signed up and enjoyed it too until they dumped a big firewall around the US. They'd be way over 20 million if it weren't for arcane laws preventing the rest of the free world enjoying their awesome service.
All ebook readers have mp3 players including the kindle.
Audio advertisements perform poorly for general and online services. Audio is, however, excellent for local advertising.. but they'd need to build quite a bit of infrastructure and do a lot of marketing to make that viable.
Two main issues come to mind:

1. Project size. It's usually easier to get an IDE to build your project, parse any errors, and show the right lines of code in a debugger, than it is to get a good compile/fix/debug cycle setup in Emacs.

2. Language complexity. There's a lot of variance between languages on what your text editor will support in terms of parsing, symbolics browsing (e.g. a class browser, function popup, etc.), and what you need for that language.
I bought an E70 because of Maddox's post, about 18 months ago. He was right for the time. The iPhone was a sort of cutting edge experiment lacking true practicality back then. 3G, the App Store, and some firmware updates have changed all that..

I now have an iPhone. The E70 was ultimately a pile of crap. The keyboard was great, sure, but the OS would crash routinely, the case got busted up (and I rarely go out!), the battery life crumbled to pathetic levels, and the OS was so unresponsive most of the time that it put you off actually using the more advanced features it had.

So.. Maddox was right, but the iPhone is now the deserved champion.
"I’m very skeptical of results that claim that some large fraction of the population is incapable of some mental feat like programming. 500 years ago the same was thought of reading, writing, and arithmetic."

Exactly. At birth we are basically no different from someone born 100, 500, 1000 years ago. People in the past we not stupid. In fact, the giants who's shoulders we stand on now are from the past.

This isn't to say the camel doesn't have two humps. I tried pretty hard in college to learn German, but by then it was too late. Kids can learn languages without even trying because they're wired to learn languages. Waiting till college to learn German effectively doomed me to failure.

A similar thing might be happening with programming. Some people don't start thinking about programming until pretty late, sometimes as late as college or beyond. Perhaps some of the people who "just can't get it" could have had a chance if they started sooner.

This would imply that there is no fix at the college level; the solution is to start introducing programming/logic earlier.
emacs's "keyboard macros" feature is something I've not seen in any IDE and when you master it and start getting creative with it you can save insane amounts of time. Basically any time you need to make a bunch of changes of the same pattern to a file you can teach emacs how to make the change and then tell emacs to make the change X more times to the file. When you are accustomed to this feature and you need it and it's not there it's INSANELY frustrating! But then you remember you can just start up emacs so it's not really a big deal at all. :)
They list links.

Google search lists links.

Digg should sell content placement at the top of their lists of links and content placement in the sidebars like Google does and Techmeme as well.

This way, instead of hiring a team of 4 people to game Digg like the Chicago Tribune did, they can just pay the money straight to Digg for front page placement and call it a day. Everyone's happier and you get fewer marketers spamming the site night and day.
It should be Flash 10 on Experimental Linux distribution broken.
In Java, you can store an object in an array and then modify that object in both the array copy and the one you have in a regular variable because Java works by reference, not by copy.

LOL. In what language does array assignment result in a new copy of that data structure rather than a reference of it?

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

In computer science an array[1] is a data structure consisting of a group of elements that are accessed by indexing.

Answer: None.

You'll get tripped up on a type mismatch error

Every real language has types. Java catches most errors at compile time. That's an advantage for students.
Advanced Searches With Pagination Using Django
Interesting read, but I have to quote this part:

2.4.4 Fancy Modems

High-speed modems (9600 bps and higher) are starting to become quite common.
Well, technically Apple is regulating the distribution, which is factor of supply. I'm not an economist and may be mixing certain terms, but the bottom line is that I can't sell an app directly to a customer, so the App Store is inherently not a free market. Therefore, Apple IS regulating the supply of my products! How much is debatable, but as someone who has several apps in the store, and talks quite frequently with other developers, I'd say my argument in the blog post is the reality of the current market.

Also, the charts are "voodoo" in their ability to create exposure for an app. You have to have enough sales to first get into the charts, but once you're there, it's amazing how things change. I've had developers describe it as being "sucked" up into the top 10. There is an undeniable momentum that is created once you break the top 50.

As far as changing how the charts work, did you read my blog post? What I suggested is that apps be ranked by volumeprice or even (2volume)*price to calculate the rankings. That's no easier to game then the current system. People have to buy the app either way, and raising the price will only benefit apps that have enough value to warrant a higher price. The idea of the App Store charts is to get the best apps in front of people. My argument is that by ranking only by price, you're getting cheap apps in front of people, not necessarily the best ones. By taking price into account, amazing niche market apps that can demand a higher price will get the same exposure as a broad market $.99 app.

I definitely agree that search needs work, but even with search, there has to be an order in which they are displayed. For a long time it was also volume. Recently it changed, but I can't find any pattern to it. With a ton of crappy apps in the store, showing search results in a random order doesn't help the consumer. Popular apps should still be rewarded with good placement. I'm just questioning how that popularity is determined.
Get 3.1b2. I found it considerably faster

/etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ubuntu intrepid main #firefox-3.1

The only problem is you have to install it then update your shortcuts to launch "firefox-3.1" instead of just "firefox." And move your profile to ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.1/<stuff>. I have over 30 extensions & they all worked after updating & overriding compatibility
What you're actually trying to do is known as price discrimination. In other words, you want people who value the spaces more to pay more. Airlines, for example, do this by charging more if your trip doesn't span a Saturday (since that means it's likely a business trip and business travelers tend to be willing to pay more). Grocery stores do it with coupons (by your willingness to cut out coupons you reveal yourself to be more price sensitive). More generally, companies often do price discrimination by offering two tiers of service (like Windows Professional Edition vs Windows Home Edition, or whatever).

So you'll have to come up with something like that. None of the auction proposals (Dutch, M+1st price, whatever) will do it because everyone will pretend to be poor.

PS: Student/senior discounts are another classic form of price discrimination (the assumption being that students and seniors tend to be more price sensitive).
Joining A Startup
Generally speaking venture capitalists fund companies that can either be acquired for a substantial sum, or that can go public.

There are investors in other industries who would not have "go public" as a condition, although they may not be VCs per-se. Law firms can be acquired for significant amounts though and they're usually very profitable, so there's an opportunity, but unlike technology/sciences/product development/retail it's really hard to weigh up the factors surrounding a law firm to establish the risk.

I don't know of any law firms that have gone public

It's pretty much unheard of (the first went public in 2007 - http://is.gd/cDks). There are lots of potential issues, such as loyalty to shareholders affecting attorney-client privilege. There are laws in the UK and US regarding this too. Don't quote me on this, but commonly non-lawyers cannot own shares in law firms in the US.
Is that all of Europe or selected countries?
emacs's integration with C/C++'s compile/build/debug cycle is insanely good. M-x compile and M-x gdb work perfectly.

Integration with Common Lisp (SBCL at least) and Python are both also excellent.

I can't speak about other languages/systems but all the ones I use extensively have really tight emacs integration. Perhaps Java integration is weak?
Web Design and Development Company
Redix Web is one of the top Indian website design company and was recognized as the leading Indian IT related solution & service provider company in the area of web designing and web application development, multimedia development & data processing.
i think it's a matter of perspective. people's perspectives can be very different. it didn't hit me until i got really smashed one night and my vision became many times more detailed. the world looked beautiful. no doubt there are people that can see that clearly all the time, people who live in the world, as opposed to outside of it which is how it feels i am. those people are probably the ones who can "get" drawing, and who might wonder why it is that others don't get it

when it comes to programming however, i bet these people can confuse the letters on the screen for the program itself, or it might not be clear to them that the semantics of the language are rich and are more important for understanding it than its syntax is, and other fundamental misconceptions like that

i can see better if i put a lot of focus on it, but it would take practice to make it something i could readily call forth or sustain, and even then i don't know if i could see as clearly as when i'm drunk, or as clearly as someone for whom it is natural. going the other way, how do you show people what to look at when programming? i can give myself visual tasks like "try to perceive all of the individual blades of grass on the lawn at the same time," but what is an equivalent exercise for someone who finds programming difficult?
I considered creating an iPhone game where each player would participate in a shared world that would be designed around the constraints of the high-latency EDGE network. The game would be free on the app store, but would cost $5/mo after 30 days. (I'd prompt each user for billing info from within the app.)

The reason I didn't devote my energy to that project is because I don't want to develop a product that hinges on a billing mechanism that circumvents the app store, because that seems like it could (perhaps rightfully) piss Apple off, since they wouldn't be getting their cut, and my game would be vaporized at Apple's discretion. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- it's their platform, and they can manage it how they like. But the lack of "subscription" billing for apps probably precludes many larger projects.
Simplest method is still the best:

Write something that works. Run it at production loads. If it's not good enough, work on it. Don't worry about speed until you hit that. Only exception is if you know N's going to be big enough to be problematic.

In that case, do just enough optimization to make it reasonable.

Why? Optimization and maintainability* are often at opposing ends. It's best to avoid the costs of it when it's not needed, and the increasing capacities of computers should make you bias towards maintainability.

* and ease of debugging, and concerns for low software complexity, and likelihood that it will be well documented, and .....
Is it unique in having an incredibly shallow tail?
The wide (and weird) world of two-screen laptops
I didn't think about #4 - good point.

All in all, I think the amazing gap (%50) between Israel and the next nation probably also stems from the high proportion of technology companies in Israel. All these companies that go through laptops and dev machines at high cycles must make a big difference.
That's got more to do with the size of all the frameworks & libraries loaded in, than the actual code of the app.

A modern desktop app has a lot more expected of it than one from the 1980s (GUI, copy-paste with styled text & embedded objects, drag & drop, undo, etc), and that code costs time to link in, use, and let run.