skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all about the concepts which the language bases itself on and the way that people think about problems.

I think the easiest way to see this is a (somewhat contrived) example. Imagine there are two languages, which run equally efficiently for equivalent problem specifications. The first one is basically just C; its conceptual model matches the way the hardware it runs on fairly closely. The second is something like Haskell; most of its concepts come from mathematics and formal computer science, and as such it places fairly strong restrictions on what you can and cannot do.

Both of these would be capable of calculating whatever you wanted (assuming they're both Turing-complete), but the C-like language would be better suited for tasks that require knowledge of the hardware (systems programming) while the Haskell-like language would be better suited for mathematical/theoretical type programs. (The difference between two C-like languages would be negligible, assuming equivalent libraries and efficiency.)

Both would work for other things, of course, but they may not be as nice to use.
I tend to spend all my time in emacs, and for me the paging stuff and special keystrokes just get in the way -- but the ability to detach from a session and resume it later is awesome. For a program that just does that and otherwise gets out of your way, I recommend checking out dtach:

http://dtach.sourceforge.net/

The two second tutorial:

$ dtach -A /tmp/ek -z emacs # start or resume session identified by /tmp/ek

To detach from the session, type control-backslash. (The -z disables suspend with Control-Z.)
Seems like those little observer robots on the Death Star:

http://www.hoylen.com/photos/2002-10-12-starwars/sw047.jpg

No bad spin intended. As far as use goes, that's what it reminds me of.
The forces that prevent you from keeping someone else in slavery is coercion. So is the rule that says you're not allowed to walk out into the street and just have your way with someone without their consent. With such loose language, any type of society settlement in which people are born into a system that has rules that apply to them involves a type of coercion.

Since all people need to be cared for until a certain age, all people who survive past the first few days of their lives are born into coercion under a strict meaning of the word. Some would escape by living as hermits in desert land or remote islands that nobody cared to enforce law on. Hell - if you're going to be a pedant why restrict it to human coercion? The weather itself is a form of coercian. As are the laws of physics themselves.

Although in a strict sense you're right, I think you're wasting time. However, I have a morbid curiosity for some things and would be genuinely interested to learn what axe you're grinding.
There is a link at the bottom of the news page labelled "FAQ".

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Thanks for your time. We like it too :-)

You're right about the long Summary list. Improving this one is actually on our ToDo right now. Great suggestion, thanks!
It's stuff like this made me sad to hear they'll be re-mortgaging their building.
I'm not grinding any axe. mseebach said that he didn't see how property rights were a form of coercion. You have explained precisely why they are. You are agreeing with me against him. I am not right in a 'strict sense', but in an absolutely correct sense. What could be a better example of coercion than enforcing a law?
User interaction/interface design tips
Although the tips are targeted at Adobe Flex designers/developers, I found these generic enough that it applies to all Web UI designers/developers.
i assume there are tons of millionaires out there who do as little (if not less!) work than Frind. espeically considering inheritance and resting on the laurels of subordinates or slaves (re: recent alavery article that appeared on hn a few weeks back).

the neat part is that Frind very strategically set this up for himself. maybe this will encourage more people to value smart moves over cramming work-hours (mindless or otherwise).
Actually, any photographer doing commercial photography gets a release with an age statement to protect themselves against later lawsuits by parents. If the kids are underage they need the parents signature. A company using the photographs for commercial purposes will usually requires the release.
Linux-based HP Mini Mi ships with command line disabled
Google Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta
I signed up:

+ve: very slick and liked the design a lot.

-ve: whilst the UI was slick I found it a bit clunky. It took too many clicks to achieve things, particularly adding an Itinerary - I think being able to blast a bunch of cities into a text box would be the way I'd like to start.
In those cases, too, the rule of law is not quite working. The letter of the law is often being obeyed (and there is some debate about even that concerning things like the establishment of the Fed) but the system is being gamed.

What it comes down to is this: is the general populace comfortable enough to engage in open economic activity?

You can see that there is a lot less confidence in the US and the rest of the world, in large part due to various stupid decisions. But this doesn't prove that anarcho-capitalism works. It just shows that corrupt capitalism doesn't work well either.
A quad-core iPhone?
This reads like a physiological (and subsequent psychological) breakdown. Please see a physician.
Food is pretty essential. Why don't you get the government to provide that too? And water? What about work? People need work - it's a human right! Why stop there? Head on up Maslows. Why shouldn't all people reach the top of Maslow's hierarchy. And if they should - well then surely it's the role of their fellow man to facilitate it through the efficient, modest and even-handed institution of government!
"On paper, Porsche made between €30-40 billion in the affair. Once all is said and done, the actual profit is closer to some €6-12 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, Porsche’s revenue for the whole year of 2006 was a bit over €7 billion."

Just shows how out of whack the whole economy is in that Porsche could make more money for their shareholders by playing financial games then actually manufacturing products.
Are My Sites Up?
"Frind estimates, based on exit surveys, that the site creates 800,000 successful relationships a year."

Personally, I find impact on human lives of that scale rather interesting.
Food is pretty essential. Why don't you get the government to provide that too?

Done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_Sta...

The subsidy programs give farmers extra money for their crops, as well as guarantee a price floor. For instance in the 2002 Farm Bill, for every bushel of wheat sold farmers were paid an extra 52 cents and guaranteed a price of 3.86 from 2002–03 and 3.92 from 2004–2007.[2] That is, if the price of wheat in 2002 was 3.80 farmers would get an extra 58 cents per bushel (52 cents plus the $0.06 price difference).

.

Also, please see:

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Stamp
I agree with all of your points. But the truth is, is that it is just one current in human affairs. No nation has ever been free of irrational delusion or demagoguery and entirely driven by rationality. This includes regimes like the Soviet Union, which supposedly had rationalist materialist philosophical underpinnings.

True, rationality can be pervasive, and it can be taught, but it can never be totally dominant. Our primitive substrate keeps coming out, and that is every bit as pervasive as rationality.
Hi dmv,

Are you still having a problem? Sometimes the Twitter widget in the sidebar at http://venturehacks.com gets a little wacky. I believe it is an intermittent problem with Twitter.

I thought it was very rare but perhaps it is more common than I thought? Is anyone else having this problem? I couldn't recreate it. Thanks!
multitty emacs (http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.html) already allows you to do just that either from a graphical or a vanilla-tty environment.
I don't want a phone, I just want an updated T|X - is it hopeless?
Thank you!

We have done a lot of traveling ourselves, and the original inspiration for the site was to package all the various spreadsheets, notes, and disjoint sites that we've used during the planning.

Are we at the point where we can replace all of that? Not yet. But we are getting there, and using the site gives you automatic access to all the tools that are coming online the next little while.

You have a _nice_ place (no nasty ads) to store all the information related to your trip, in a way that you'll enjoy in the future (in fact, you will have access to some really cool stuff that we have planned almost for free as you'll have all the relevant information in one place). So the more we develop the site, the more you'll get out of your data without you having to do anything additionally.

Now, you seem like a sophisticated user, and probably you'll still need your spreadsheets. But we can certainly use feedback from users like you in terms of features that would help you ditch those spreadsheets.

So indeed, short term plans are to mix in the current data with your plans. Give you customized documentation based on your itinerary. Make it easier for you to search the best travel rates (or even doing it automagically for you).

We'll get there shortly.
Her startup: http://brazencareerist.com/
As others have mentioned, you desperately need to explain what you do on the front page. Once I understood what your site is, my first thought was "Facebook for traveling."

Now the hard part. What do you provide that people can't already do on Facebook? This is what you need to stress.
What do you mean by "essentially child porn"?
Maybe, but the money appears to be very real.
User Scripts (Greasemonkey) Support in Google Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta
A brief history of GUILE
I'm sorry, I feel for you, but it seems like a lot of this stuff is not necessarily related to your business so much as it is personal.
Wow, congratulations.

How did you get your initial growth? i.e. where did you find your first 100 guilds and how did you convince them to sign up?
> What could be a better example of coercion than enforcing a law?

Well - gravity.

I mistook your motive. I've read the thread a few more times and see you've been quite specific in your responses.
Educatious isn't easily spelt, I'm not really keen..
http://www.rolyn.co.uk/wub.htm
Nah. The navigation keys on the home row are a throwback to when terminals were less likely to handle control keys correctly. If that's not a problem you have, then don't worry about it.

You'll probably benefit from getting the commands to move by paragraphs, functions, pairs of () {} <>,
I would choose a career of a $15/hour laborer for myself. That's more than I make now, or will make with my current opportunities for advancement.

So, can I have all of your money now? Or would you like me to direct you to a charity to which you can donate it on my behalf?
Is there a better technical description of WebOS around somewhere? It describes the OS is "windows based" on that link. I am curious if it will run regular Windows Mobile applications. Essentially, is WebOS a UI/usability layer on top of Windows Mobile?
I run screen in every one of my terminals and it has made me much more efficient. The keystrokes are more natural than tab switching and detaching is great. It's especially nice to label your screens so you can quickly tell the difference between local and remote shells (live vs staging, for instance).
> you won't be able to write efficiently on any other computer than yours.

Not my experience, at all. It takes a second to switch gears mentally, but it's not at all different from people fluent in multiple languages. Context helps, though: I type Dvorak on my desktop, my laptop, and my computer in the office, but Qwerty on other computers.
So I assume via your company that you have field experience with people using this scheme. How often do their users need to go through that reset?

I think it's a terrible thing to happen to users, hoping there is a way to make it less likely (the users I am going to accomodate will not necessarily be technology fluent).

But if it simply never happens...
Google's "Mesh" Network Failing
It would seem that Google's plans to make its own router are coming thanks to an ever more fragile existing setup.
Great idea - one of the best suggestions we got for that area of the site. We'll look into implementing it in the next little while. P.S. Glad you like the looks :)
Multiple profiles looks nice. Hopefully cookies are segregated so I can easily keep multiple Google accounts open. Edit: profiles appear to be completely different sessions, which is awesome.
Just have to say, "T-shirts are underwear."

(Watch this get downmodded out of oblivion.]
You may criticise the branding and marketing, but I think the product's as close to the ideal as anyone on the market has managed to announce so far.

MMS? Check. Stereo Bluetooth? Check. Copy/paste? Check. Headphone jack? Check. Physical volume buttons? Check. Camera with flash? Check. Physical keyboard? Check. Exchange support? Check. Multitasking? Check. Wi-Fi? Check. Multitouch? Check. GPS? Check. Removable battery? Check. A decent web browser? Check. Decent looks? Check. Good UI? Check.

No obvious glaring flaws exist - admittedly it's missing video-calling, but I doubt many use it, and battery-life and price are still up in the air, but so far it looks pretty damn good. The fact it's CDMA-only and carrier tied is a bit of a shame, but they say a GSM version is going to appear in the rest of the world. One concern is whether applications will be developed for their platform, but that remains to be seen. I think the UI is above and beyond the iPhone's in many ways - the task switching and general lack of clutter is amazing and the cards analogy is inspired. The whole package just seems fantastic.
"window-based" not "Windows-based". It's built on Linux.
With so many 'co-founders', a good deal of that stress should be off-loaded to others.

That confessional reads as though she's swimming through it all alone.
I'm not the poster above, but the best-known example of propagandizing about them is a paper called "The Fable of the Keys" by Liebowitz and Margolis (http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html), which dragged the Qwerty vs. Dvorak issue into the middle of an academic holy war about the free market. Much of the resulting Qwerty vs. Dvorak arguments have really been about economics, not their actual merits as keyboard layouts. (The only argument about the layouts themselves in the paper concerns whether typing on Dvorak is inherently faster.) The two links lliiffee gave above are by the authors of "The Fable of the Keys" and a newspaper column including a refutation by marketing professor, respectively. (I'm not sure who the "guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind" jerf mentions is, though.)

Now, I really don't care about economic ideology, but I like facts. The Dvorak keyboard places more frequently used letters on the home row than Qwerty* . Also, all of the vowels are on the left hand, which means that typing will generally alternate between hands.

If you agree that it is better to spend most time typing on the home row (to reduce finger travel and general hand contortion/RSI) and to not type several letters in a row on the same hand (compare "reverberated" to "antiskepticism" on Qwerty, for example), then Dvorak is objectively better by your standards. (All bets are off if you're typing in Czech or something, of course.)

* Specifically, "asdfg hjkl;" vs. "aoeui dhtns". Semicolon! I suppose Qwerty could have PrintScrn/SysRq there instead, though.
Are there any plans for a mac version of chrome?
To say that it's missing features is to imply that they could add features and then it would be as good. That's not the case I see, as a shell is little without the surrounding ecosystem, and Windows doesn't have it.

PowerShell is missing QWAN; The linux CLI is the same if you boot to it or boot to a GUI and open a terminal, or SSH in. It has a wide ecosystem of meta-apps which aid using the CLI such as screen and less, and it's been built up over the years with bash/readline keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that lots of nix programs are CLI programs with GUI wrappers, or configured with text files you can edit in emacs/vim.

The Windows command line window is all there is (you can't boot to 'DOS' anymore, or SSH in without third party software - and if you do it's a different kind of experience). There's nothing much to do as most programs aren't CLI programs and aren't configured with text files and aren't scriptable and you don't really want to poke around in the registry if you have to be typing "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\..." or whatever. There are no emacs keyboard shortcuts and everything is shoved in folders with long names and capital letters and spaces and it's just not as good*. On top of that, PowerShell is a misleading name - since it's not really a shell, it's more like irb or the Python interactive interpreter. Sure you can "change directories" and such, but it's not really a bash competitor, not a shell in that sense.

But on paper, feature for feature? Who knows, they're probably quite close...
I'm loving the word "intension." I always talk about the extensive vs. intensive dichotomy when I'm talking about websites, business strategy, life. I didn't realize there was a noun form.
"Coerce" is defined in the OED as "persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats", so I don't think gravity really falls under that definition, except perhaps metaphorically.
Exactly. When the definition involves "I know it when I see it," there are going to be gray areas.
Something like this already exists: TopCoder. They are pretty well known and have a good reputation, so they will be hard to compete against. With that said, however, there are a lot of things that can be improved: (like what you hinted at) you can have each company submit their own problem and make it more open, etc. If you are going to run with this idea, good luck!
Yeah. What should he do instead, stay at home and mope? You can only work on your resume so much, make so many follow up phone calls, call in favors and tap into your network so much, browse job ads on the Internet for so long.
Startups don't do research. Some may try to commercialize research. Some research labs may also try to commercialize research. But true research is not something anyone would risk VC on. True research takes decades to see any ROI and usually even then it is unclear exactly what the ROI is, making traditional funding metrics useless. Here is an interesting book about Dupont, IBM, and other research labs trying to quantify the output of their research labs:

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6200&page=6

Bottom line: you have to invest in research because you know it will pay off. But it is impossible to say exactly how or when it will pay off. The only kind of institution that can support that kind of investment is government or large (probably monopolistic) corporations.
there must be a better place to sell this than ebay?
Not quite. Some things like back-scrolling and multi-mode are still incredibly useful.
That's very very impressive. Can this be used to "multiply" bone marrow from one donor, to make enough for many people?
Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.
At school we often had to draw class diagrams, basically boxes containing some text, with arrows pointing to other boxes. The free tool we were using for this was made with Java, and would often be very buggy and was generally hated. I couldn't really find anything I liked and ended up making the diagrams in Gimp, not fun. I was really pining for a small perhaps Flash-based web tool that would let me make diagrams and download as PDF.
Yes, see the FAQ: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/faq
Mac build instructions: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/MacBuildInstructions
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/05/15/takedown-faq/

I've seen a DMCA takedown template somewhere, but I can't find it right now.
I have dealt with these type of folks before and DMCA threats mean very little to them.

You don't send the takedown to the spammer; you send to their hosting company, who has to take action by law.
Apple loses multi-touch exclusive to Palm
Tell HN: Interesting speakers this month at Staceys Bookstore, et al in San Francisco
Novel Approaches to Sequences of Learning
I'm almost inspired to build a web site in Fortran.
Screen's better than detach because, for one, you can create multiple terminals in a single screen session, like a tabbed GUI terminal, and then detach and re-attach to them all at once.

I use a .screenrc that provides a textural "toolbar" at the bottom of the terminal so it's easy to see how many you've got running. Configuration is listed on this page: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060422.html
screen + rtorrent has substantially increased my pirate bay consumption...
With the proviso that this is more applicable to us knowledge workers than to a business which needs massive capital investments: there is another option to being a slave to investors. Bootstrap.

I started my business with a budget of $60, and spent $56 of that. Every. Single. Penny. of expenses since then has come from a paying customer. I have never worried about not being able to make payroll. OK, technically, there is no payroll (I'm not the world's biggest fan of the employer/employee relationship, for many reasons), but when I tell my freelancers "Hey, Bob, I will pay you a thousand dollars if you can do X up to your usual level of quality, how's about it?", I have never once thought "Oh, effity, now I have to convince someone to give me a thousand dollars so I can pay for Bob's time". (One reason Bob, and the rest of my freelancers, are typically happy to work for me is that I pay my invoices in Net 30 -- minutes, that is.)

This means that instead of being tied to the telephone, I think I have made two calls in 3 years. The first was to give someone their credentials because their email inbox was full and they had indicated it was an emergency for them. The second was when Google asked me for a favor, because when Google asks for a favor I can damn well make time for a phone call.
Personally I think ethics are important. Its ok (in fact recommended) to be nutty. But it's not ok to be evil.

Though I agree with you about the business press. That's a whole other problem (much related to what I just said).
But that doesn't count, of course.
What is people's experience on choosing colors that are easier on the eyes? Any preferences or suggestions?
“house is on fire - we’re out! shit” - Twitter proves itself again
thanks, always wondered.
Good lead. I found this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

@calbers it agrees with you, but also states that I should file a DMCA takedown.

"If you believe the content should be removed from Google's index because of a copyright infringement, you should file a DMCA takedown request. Unlike requests to remove spam or personal information, DMCA requests must come from the content owner."

Thanks!
The information/example for "hardstatus" in the article is nice. I had only used "screen" briefly, and didn't realize that a constantly-visible status line was possible. The default configuration, which is to display no evidence that "screen" is running, isn't as useful in my opinion.
Google Chrome Dev update: New WebKit version, new features, and a new Dev channel