skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are certainly counter-examples to Churchill's thesis. While Singapore is technically a democracy, it has been under one-party rule for 50 years. In the early years of independence, the ruling party used its power to persecute its primary political opponent, the communist movement which was sweeping southeast Asia at the time.

Now Singapore is a clean and prosperous state with a per capita GDP higher than the USA and three times higher than its neighboring countries. There are things to dislike about Singapore if you are accustomed to Western political liberties, but it is hard to say that it would be better off if it had followed the dictates of liberal western democracy, especially in the precarious early years.

Chile is the most prosperous state in South America, although it was led to that point by a dictator that did horrible things to his political opponents. Iraqis had a higher standard of living under Saddam than they do under the current regime, though not if you opposed the government.
I made one. :) http://newsbrane.com

Please send me feedback!
No, you summed it up perfectly. Psychology Today is a lifestyle magazine that just happens to have 'Psychology' in the title.
"you still have to write the GPU code in C"

You're almost better off writing python modules in C that take advantage of CUDA for specific applications instead of using a general one that really doesn't hide any of the more difficult pats of the CUDA API anyways.
Also see Larry Wall's fairly odd take on postmodern programming: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
The Best Program according to Don Knuth
Speaking of which, feel free to Digg my variant on the above site. However, these days it's really hard to get on the Digg frontpage.

http://tinyurl.com/7t2ydc

:)
I think postmodern programming is a combination of both Alan Kay's versions.

An example from my own experience: take Django code base, replace Django templates with Mako, replace Django ORM with an existing object database, add some nice features from other web frameworks, glue everything together, write tests and you have a new web framework, yet there's very little new code. Thus I 1. used existing tools; 2. built my own tool at the same time.

That's how I understand the term "postmodern programming".
Dude, that's just like wrong, on so many levels...
snap. hit me back if you want to work on this; i've got some things started but i'm open to collaboration (diN0bot@bilumi.org).
Credit crisis: 'The worst is over' - Steve Forbes
I am curious exactly what you think democracy is, then. The combination of democracy with large bureaucracies is vulnerable to horse trading and power abuse, behind-the-scenes deals and favors, pork politics, and the like. Bureaucracy is needed to implement the policies desired by democracy, so there is really no way around it.

I think of some examples of well-run, transparent democracies in history, but they are all much geographically smaller, less populated, or poorer than the United States.
Unfortunately, the goals of a video game are not similar to the goals of learning to use and using an editor. The only thing you gain from not having all tools immediately available at your disposal/discoverable is frustration because you're still in the editor and not done editing. Game playing is a task unto itself, editing is a means to an end.
The point is valid, the "signs" to back it up are tenuous and the attempts at humour lame.

While I don't disagree with the author's premise the article probably isn't worth your time reading.
I was under the impression that S3 data, including EBS, has never had a case of data loss that Amazon knows of.

Where did you get your annual failure rate data?
M-x apropos - Search for info on subject

That was my next guess! Drat!

Seriously though, what does "apropos" mean? In Common Lisp I always have to stop and remember it whenever I need to search packages for a symbol. A dictionary defines it as "by way of interjection or further comment", which isn't really meaningful. Maybe the name is a historical artifact?
Listing all the relevant differences between the Soviet Union and the United States in culture, finances, and politics would literally require a book, or even a series of books. I'm all for learning from history, but there's just so many differences between the two that I'm completely unconvinced there's a useful comparison to be drawn.

Which isn't to say there won't be a collapse. Perhaps it will even be worse. I'm simply saying I don't think this argument has much value.

Certainly, if what he described was happening, rather than a run-of-the-mill recession, I would expect commodity prices to be rising, not dropping. Dropping commodity prices are a good thing for the economy; they were probably credit-inflated too.

Not to mention this whole "five stages of collapse" is really just an ass-pull, something this guy said to make it sound like he wasn't just making it up as he goes. See also: The entire self-help book industry, with six-step thises and twelve-step thats.
I'd say a hammer's interface is pretty intuitive. Surely thoughtful interface design matters.
Honestly, who cares? Why are so many inane articles submitted to HN?
Merry Christmas and Happy Coding! (I know you have nothing to do and just stay in house and code!)
... which could've been made by some guy with a hangover during a weekend spent picking his nose and eating stale pizza while watching re-runs of Gilligan's Island ...

That isn't how people in a startup are supposed to work? Shoot, I've been doing it all wrong.
Just intellectually curious -- why is that saddening? My thoughts are, people can do what they'd like with their money.
Port https://wiki.mozilla.org/JSctypes to v8, get C libraries for, well, cheap if not actually "free"... probably wouldn't take that much effort, but I'm just guessing. For bonus points, start sharing JSctypes-based wrappers between the two implementations.

Actually, if you're serious about JS-on-the-server, that's probably just about the most useful single thing you could possibly do to help it. Well, unless you're really attached to the JVM...
Way too much whitespace, way too few articles/vertical inch.
Alot of revenue is siphoned out of the urban, prosperous areas in the United States and sent to the rural backwaters. Flyover country receives more money from the feds than it pays in federal taxes, and the dense and rich regions face the opposite calculus.

Hong Kong imposes an 18% flat tax on its citizens. New York City could never get away with that, since its citizens already pay about half their incomes to the feds. Instead New York runs on a 3% tax, and I don't think the services they get from the feds make up for lost value.

If New York city got 15% more of its citizens income, hell yeah it could build a magnetic anti-gravity bullet train run off of angel farts. But it has its share to pay of pork projects in Alaska and troop presence in 170 countries.
Open Source radically alters the equation; when I build a system on Open Source, even though I may not have built it, I do own it. I own it collectively, but still fully individually, in a way that really only works for software. As a home user I don't find myself fiddling with source often, but as a professional programmer building on an open source stack I do it all the time, and it is qualitatively different than working on a closed stack.

At PARC, I'm sure the cost of "fixing other people's stuff" was more than "building your own"; a few hundred million lines of code later, that balance has changed a bit.
Hey, thanks, and same to you!
Presumably most of the readers of Hacker News are also hackers, why don't we post every single one of their blog posts too...?
Aw, that makes me happy.

For those of us in grad school on the other side of a continent from a family that doesn't celebrate Christmas anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_29UU439gAs
"The financial crisis was caused by more than lack of, and lack of enforcement of, existing regulation, but that was certainly a large part of it."

Actually, that's something that regulation proposals need to address, which is that regulatory resources are already stretched well beyond the breaking point. How will loading more regulations onto the system really help? Regulations need to get smarter, not merely more numerous.

The current answer of SOX seems to be to offload regulation onto the companies themselves, but above and beyond the fact that the regulatory burden doesn't really belong there (per the trickle of "SOX is bad, mm'kay?" stories you see on HN), increased self-regulation is inherently problematic.
I had the same idea, still just learning PHP

Good Luck, freemium is hard.
nods

Point taken. Some people actually do stuff like this, though, and I don't think jokes like this should be propagated (or at least unopposed) on HN.
I didn't buy my Macbook to "feel special". I bought it because Windows sucks.
merry festivus
http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/

There's a section called "Amazon EBS Volume Durability" that goes over it. S3 is different from EBS. S3 is a lot more reliable. S3 is a spray files all over the place system like Danga's MogileFS. You simply save, say, 5 copies of a file on random servers and the likelihood that you're going to have data loss on all 5 of those servers before the system can replicate back up to having 5 copies of the file is next to nothing. Like, you loose two copies, but then the system creates two new copies on two other servers to get back up to 5 copies of the file.

EBS is less reliable. It's more like a RAID array. You can't really have a volume that spans different machines, nevermind a volume that spans data centers as S3 can. With EBS, a fire could just burn the disks an that would be the end of it (while, with S3, other data centers are unlikely to experience a similar fire in a short time frame). It's highly unlikely that EBS will fail on you - with an annual failure rate of 0.1%-0.5%, you shouldn't have to worry much.

So, EBS is a reliable storage system, but it isn't S3. Of course, S3 could never be fast like EBS. So, there is a trade off. Really, with EBS you can just snapshot it to S3 ever day and sleep soundly. In the highly unlikely event that you have a failure, you can restore without loosing more than 24 hours of data and the chance that you'll have to even do that is so low, but not as low as S3 where you can sleep completely soundly.
This is now nearly two months old. I wonder if Steve Forbes would be singing the same tune today?
While there is more to localization than just translation, I colleted these resrouces for transaltion of small chunks:

http://www.cucumis.org/translation_1_w/ - free (peer-to-peer)

http://www.onehourtranslation.com/en/ - $4/100 words
Who's that for?
My Airing of Grievances: You're a few days late for Festivus. Does this still count as an airing of grievances because of the lateness?
I like the green-and-red numbers that've shown up.
Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File
It depends on price and what's involved.

Don't do it for free. As much as free and freemium has become all the rage, I'd want to pay for this. I wouldn't want excessive fees, but consulting like this can't be free. It involves human work and not cursory work if it's going to be good.

Do more than simply translations. First, I don't think many people in the UK would care so much about spelling, but also I think translation is easier to come by than a lot of stuff. Geo/mail stuff is a pain when you don't know the country. What services are you thinking of offering.
And also from xkcd: http://xkcd.com/521/
Mastering The Linux Shell - Bash Shortcuts Explained (Now With Cheat Sheets)
You're right, but whether the dictator was necessary is disputable. Maybe all you need is Chicago economists. Nowadays Chile is ruled by the people who were tortured or at least jailed under the old regime (Ricardo Lagos, Michelle Bachelet) and all of Pinochet's children are in jail because of corruption. [1] Right now, it's very democratic, and not all that corrupt. Apparently, one of the best ways to return to democracy is for the tortured to forgive the torturers and rule the country henceforth. This also happened in the Seychelles.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc%C3%ADa_Hiriart
Democracy != Meritocracy
Recommendation – Ignore All The 2009 Predictions
I wasent aware of those yahoo videos on advanced js programming... Absolutely awsome! My only regret is that I can't vote this up 50 times :)

This actually solves a lot of my javascript design woes. I will start adapting some useful patterns now :) Leave it to the folks at yahoo to come up with some brilliant solutions.
Merry Christmas, and happy 4th night of Hanukkah too!
Will PSR (Personal Social Responsibility) Replace Materialism? - Associated Content
Create a TODO list

1. Task name

2. Estimated End-Date to complete that task
Ctrl-R ftw!
This might not be entirely spot-on, but: I think that it's useful to have somebody who's ranting that much about the Ruby team, even if it's not entirely relevant. I mean, he's spent a lot of time actually talking about Ruby (see: his legendary rant), so it's not like he doesn't occasionally to get technical, but at the same time Ruby has a reputation for being very kind and friendly and wonderful, and while some Ruby people are truly wonderful (_why is incredible), it's not some mystical haven for coders, and a lot of the developers whose blogs I read seem to really make it out to be one, and that means that certain large chunks of people conform to each others' thought processes, and that's harmful. Active venting, even when it's not spot-on, encourages people not to entirely conform.

If you haven't read his lengthy rant on Ruby and the community, do it immediately, because I think that having context on Zed makes his writing a bit more worth reading.
That's perhaps a little simplistic. New Yorker fund managers wouldn't be skimming their millions off mid-westerner's retirement accounts were it not for Washington.
Yes, but if your point is that something's hypocritical and bad, it's much easier to say it rudely than it is so say it politely. Zed rants. I think if he were to write more civil-yet-critical posts, it would make for longer, less focused posts. Rudeness applies well in some situations.
It's a metaphor. It means that in the Internet world, a lot of attention is paid to him not just because of product but because of personality. Don't mock metaphors when they're used correctly, like in this case ("I saw him speak before I knew he had a reputation"). Mock them when they're ridiculous ("I want to make my website more 2.0").
Open source implementation of PageRank

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323461
"A country where lots of people ponder what everyday people and governments in other countries are doing better has many sources of ideas for local improvement"

In a country where most people have never even set foot in a modern european or asian city, the trouble is that most people don't have any idea how far behind US infrastructure has gotten.
Harmful Options
"1/5 bragging about some "exotic" place he has been"

I'm curious, what G7 nation's major city have you been to that had trains as terrible as New York?
If their money can buy the effort of other humans, problems money can't solve are actually problems humans can't solve.

If money is no object, humans can solve a lot of problems.
I don't know about that, but even so, making the cheapest SGI comparable to the most expensive Mac wasn't a recipe for mainstream success.
Definitely an interesting essay on the paradox of choice. Bonus points for the Progress Quest reference.
Hmm,

I can see why someone, maybe a "MBA biz dude", might a tad upset about someone who goes out of his way to piss all over the reputation of Rails. There actually isn't anything wrong about Rails having a cool reputation if it is going be to accepted in an ordinary. working business.

Without ever having him, I am pissed at Zed because he has good ideas and he makes himself so hated that his good ideas will not get a hearing in an organization.

I mean, if he wanted to storm the Bastille and launch the Ruby-powered communist dictatorship of the proletariat, then his screw-the-biz-people rhetoric would make sense. But he clearly wants to conduct business himself while somehow not getting a clue that reputation is a part of business.
Did they ever really have that aura? I mean, I'm a Mac fanboy. I've argued with you about Apple a thousand bajillion times on this site. I watch the keynote. But I never got into it because it was a cult thing. I got into it because every blog I liked reading took some time to talk about loving Apple (Shaun Blanc, John Gruber, John Welsh, even Paul Graham), and so I took some time out to try the computers and I really loved them, and still do. When I argue Windows with friends, it's usually because they make the argument that a Mac is not inherently better than a PC, and I happen to disagree. There's nothing pretentious about that, it's just an argument that happens.

Somewhere along the line it got decided that there's a fashion statement being made with Macs. I don't really see that. I think a certain type of person that's obsessed with aesthetic does like Apple, because it's clean, but was there ever a feeling that using Apple products made a person special? Because I've never noticed that, and yet it's brought up and constantly mocked. I don't get it.
I'm not saying this is why this was submitted, but some people do it because you can't lose karma with submissions, and because articles that'll spark controversy will attract people who upvote the article much more quickly.
Here's a question that isn't addressed: does being special matter? I thought the point of capitalism and competition was how good products were, not how special you felt using them.
A Wonderful Life? Predatory Lending in Bedford Falls
The sad thing is, I actually noticed this inconsistency. But I decided to leave it in just to see who noticed. ;)

But if you want to be more serious about it: Sure, I concede the rebuttal. Gaskin's a very creative programmer. He also works on stuff that I actually care about. I agree that passing a Microsoft certification is not in the same league as the least thing that the guy has done. And I agree that cramming for Microsoft tests is not an especially great activity to encourage a nine-year-old to do.

None of which alters my initial reaction: Congratulate the girl and move on. Just because she's no Gaskin doesn't mean she deserves to be the scapegoat for things that are not her fault (the purported meaninglessness of her prized credential; the bureaucratic, credentialist nature of the Microsoft IT consulting ecosystem; the existence of cram schools and dominating parents; the insecurity of Western IT folks about the rise of the Indian software industry; and the fact that she is nine years old and can't necessarily be expected to understand any of this). She's a living, breathing kid who may be reading this thread right now -- a kid with the potential to become creative and talented, who may already be creative and talented when she's not being paraded in front of news cameras. She's not a hypothetical pawn in our intellectual game.
I've used Word on both, and Word on Mac is better. It's not particularly good, but it's got a lot going for it - namely, a de-emphasis on over-the-top menus for sidebars - and it takes advantage of a lot of the neat Mac stuff that Windows can't do. It's still really ugly, especially compared to Pages, but it's better.
Shit. I'm going back to Ubuntu.
I think it's sad, not on the part of the developers, but on the people who enable apps like this to be worth making.
this girl's question
That's all very "maybe" though you might be correct. The test will come when the uberHip Jobs steps down and some accountant takes his place. I really dislike OSX and the only good thing about it is its Unix roots. Well...why pay a premium for Unix which should be cheaper than Windows?

Why...? Well, it is just branding, as far as I can see. It's not 300 dollars, either. It's sometimes 600 dollars for a PC vs. 1299 for an equivilent Mac. To me, that's stupid. If you don't like Windows, well, this will add $0.00 onto your price:

http://www.ubuntu.com/
Anyone can be nice to people who treat you nicely. It's not exactly difficult.

Character is how you deal with people who aren't nice.
I wish I could buy ThinkPad with Mac OS X.
Don’t buy apps for things you only need to do once in a blue moon. Find a free/open solution.

As a general rule, this seems like the exact opposite of what you should do. If the free/open solution threatens to take two hours to set up, and the for-pay software will do the job in five minutes for $19, you should probably buy the software -- unless you intend to use the open solution over and over, which will amortize the setup time over many weeks or months.

I would certainly argue that this applies to VisualHub, for example. Not having to figure out the command-line options to ffmpeg is worth $24, especially if you're only planning to use it once in a blue moon.
Reddit scares the hell out of us, because Reddit used to be as good as Hacker News, and slowly... oh so slowly are lower quality submissions coming. And then slowly that'll prompt lesser caliber people to enjoy participating. Who'll submit more lesser caliber stories, and then HN is a wasteland full of "puns" and just outright goofyness.

The average American isn't becoming a terrorist, or in any danger of terrorism. Hacker News will sink to the level of Reddit unless it's actively fought by the culture and leadership here.
(original submitter here)

I care. I care about end-user personal computing trends.

They a) amuse me and b) affect my income. That's why I submitted, to see discussion on a topic I am interested in.

Quoting from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."
I agree with you, but their short-term interests are putting them out of business. Businesses that take a long-term approach are the ones that are winning (Amazon and Toyota spring to mind).

Point being I don't think anyone can compete with Netflix right now. They've done everything right. Blockbuster deserves to loose because their short-term interests were to delay and drag their feet.
Computer-controlled Christmas light shows: a great holiday tradition.

I just wish people would use some other song besides Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Wizards in Winter"... http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22wizards+in+wi...
One might leverage some of the code from "Command Log Mode", aka mwe-log-commands, if it works the way the wiki seems to think it does:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-ja/CommandLogMode

For scripted demos, I have a vision of a tool that's like the macro recorder, but that also logs the delay time between keystrokes. You can edit the recorded results if you like, adjusting the commands and the times, then play it back and it will slowly replay all the keystrokes, while echoing the name of each command into an auxiliary buffer like CommandLogMode does.

You could play back audio in sync with the replayed keys if the emacs play-audio function actually works. (Crosses fingers.)

Actually recording audio for a demo is almost certainly beyond emacs' capability. You'd have to use some audio-recording or screencasting software and edit it all together.

The game part might be done by creating a script that sets up a Game buffer, prompts the user (in a second buffer window) to perform an task in the Game buffer, and then just keeps checking the Game buffer to see if it has reached the "win" state, at which point you congratulate the user and go on to the next task. You have to also have prominent buttons for starting the task over, or for playing the standard solution for the task so that the student can watch. You might also want to keep score in keystrokes -- move the rectangle with fewer keystrokes and hear the special victory sound!