skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also think that netbooks appeal to a different buyer too. Windows still has strong appeal to hardcore gamers, but no serious gamer is going to use a netbook for gaming. Firefox on Linux looks and feels like Firefox on Windows, so if all you want is web browsing, why not Linux? Why pay the Microsoft tax just to get IE instead? I'm sure Windows 7 will find willing buyers on netbooks, but a "Linux killer"? I don't see that. Netbook buyers are more utilitarian and value-concious, so Linux will continue to grow in that market.
Nice to see Mac getting more popular. I wish the linux desktop solutions would look more closely to how mac works then how windows does.
laughter is necessary to a healthy planet. It's also fun.
I upvoted you, because that's a great point on financial solvency.

However, it doesn't address the long-run problem of how to take back market share from foreign competitors, which is the type of sustainable advantage that I presume Detroit needs in order to thrive.

(I'll also observe that your QED was to a simple P&L equation, not to the thrust of my comment.)
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Ask HN: Any HN readers from Taiwan?
I'm a Rails developer out here learning Mandarin and been working on my own project while doing contracting. Any readers here from Taiwan? I was hoping to find some other developers / entrepreneurs to get a project started.

email: dwlists at gmail.com
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"China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs."

Full openness to information is indeed a great advantage. 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.
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A lot of the most useful stuff has to be tied to specific implementations, if not in API, then in detail. Most of that stuff would be interfaces to non-javascript libraries.
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Emacs already does something like this, albeit to a much lesser extent: Some useful commands, such as set-goal-column (C-x C-n) or narrow-to-region (C-x n n) are disabled by default and will ask if you actually intended to use them - otherwise, bumping C-x C-n would be really confusing, for example. (It makes the cursor jump to a specific column whenever you move up/down a line.)

Of course, its interface could be better structured for gradual learning - while the documentation is certainly there (info pages, C-h t), there's a lot to learn upfront. Advanced features for difficult stuff shouldn't get in the way of basic tasks.
Because what they're testing (memorized "knowledge") isn't relevant in the real world (where praxis rules).
With all the exam dumps available it is no longer difficult to clear any certification exam. However still, if this 9 year old sits in front of a PC, I will be sure she knows what she is doing. That in itself is an achievement for her age.
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The so called "Real World" consists of 80% cram jobs - that are plain routine even a robot could do. Not much of praxis needed/ used in real world.

Not every programmer needs to be a LISP/EMACS hacker.
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Any complex system that is useful when only provided the most basic functionality could "take a lesson from video games". It's essentially building the learning curve of the system into the functionality. It's really not unlike HN's system of disabling downvoting until certain karma is reached.

IT professionals I've worked with do this kind of stuff all the time to keep employees from breaking stuff until it's shown that the employees can handle the added functionality.
When differences matter and when they don't
He's right that we need to reboot -- but the irony is that it's his generation (and his mentality itself) that is forcing this. The I-got-mine, greed-is-always-good, me-first, I'm-entitled generation of baby boomers (circa 1940-1958) is directly responsible for this mess. And, as usual, it's up to us Xers to clean up.

Friedman is emblematic of his generation. He likes to make blanket statements like "the world is flat!", leaving out precious details (like the fact that cultural differences mean that a guy in Mumbai cannot so easily start the next Amazon), and expects parental-like approval from all of us. Look what I did! Look at me!

Same attitude -- self-satisfied under-achievement -- created this gigantic CF we're calling an economy. Reboot? Yes. That probably means forcing all these codgers into retirement homes where they can bitch and moan about how we Xers aren't doing well enough recovering from their disaster.
It's over $9000!
Go Daddy has been doing this for years. They don't care about the authentication portion of SSL -- just the encryption part.
During the .COM 1.0 recession, back in the stone age, one of my fellow fresh faced and unemployed CS grads was considering getting MCTS certified in order to improve his job prospects.

I used the then popular story about a 12 year old Pakistani girl who got the same certificate, to dissuade my friend.

And so I encourage all of today's fresh faced and unemployed hackers to think of that 9 year old when the current recession is wearing them down.
Do you really think that MCTS will help?
She might be unusually gifted. The article states that she has a fairly excellent memory. And it is conceivable that she has a fairly high IQ.

We wouldn't have scoffed as much if she mastered a branch of Mathematics instead.
Selflessly (this can be more difficult that it sounds) helping someone else, and then learning that what goes around comes around.

Corny, I know. Mod me down. But it's moments of genuine connection with another person that make me most proud, thrilled to be a human. I think we have to learn to empathize and to cooperate, if we are to survive as a species. And it makes me proud when I find a speck of that ability, in myself.

When it's a stranger I'll never see again, I have some confirmation that I don't expect something in return, at least not in the immediate sense.

When someone does the same for me, I feel I've seen the other side of the equation.
Has its limits when you're not in the USA.

Oh - were y'all only thinking about the USA?
That is a very good point. That's why there's got to be something that's going to tell us better than credentials about the person.
Litanies about the people Zed Shaw doesn't get along with don't qualify as Hacker News.
This is one of the things I love about being in the startup biz. On one side there's change-the-world apps that dozens of developers labor over for years at a time, slowly building a customer base, nurturing an idea with great business execution into something that provides real, tangible value to folks.

And then there's i-Fart, 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.

This is a great time to be alive!
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You can't securely exchange keys to do #2 without having #1.

Not sure why you think active attacks are more rare than any other attack against TLS/SSL sessions. Any time you are in a position to perform a passive attack (snooping) you could also perform an active attack (MITM). The only difference is which point-and-click attack tool you download.
Tech projects ZS thinks about: pretty awesome. :)

Social problems ZS blogs about: days of our lives. :(
NameCheap so far -- for personal stuff. A year ago, they had lots of good buzz, and their upstream provider was considered very solid.
Isn't HN an HN with a business/fundraising focus?
I think Americans put too much emphasis on the link between freedom of speech and information and creativity/innovation. Sometimes the most explosive innovations are made during the transition from censorship to an open public sphere - such as the parliamentary innovations of the English civil wars. Americans, and people in the West in general, need to be defamiliarised with the concept of freedom of speech and information, so that when they recognise how valuable it is, they will make better use of it.
Part of the idea behind this post is that the keys (such as C-x C-n) aren't even bound - that way describe-bindings and friends are kept relatively spartan until the features (power-ups?) are unlocked. As it is, the help functions are pretty intimidating with the amount of information available to you.

The Emacs tutorial starts this way, too. "Here's how you move a letter. Here's how you move a word. Here's how you move a page." It would be great (but probably too much to ask) for the same instructional style to continue through more advanced usage.
I believe it was myself who posted on the other list. FlexiScale certainly has had it's issues this year, there is no doubt about that, however we are all extremely confident about the new release that will be coming out in Q1 of 2009, and would really like to get people to try it.

We will also be issuing a full detailed decscription at that point of the internal issues we faced, to explain how we've overcome them.

Anyone who wants to try it at that point is more than welcome to a no-catches free trial, so we can prove we are delivering on our promises.

Regards,

Tony Lucas
CEO, FlexiScale
Cilk++ for Linux is available for download (multithread performance-sensitive apps)
For any Microsoft certification, there are dumps everywhere on the internet. I'd rather be happy if the girl became a SJCP.
I just don't think there's a market for yet another Simplified Emacs. Isn't that what jove and joe and nano are for? Isn't that what every other editor on the market is for?

The problem with learning emacs is that there are two phases. There's the stuff that you have to know or you can't do much of anything. Some of that is inevitably complicated, because it's slightly different from anything that a Mac or Windows user has seen before -- keyboard navigation, multiple modifier keys that can be used consecutively, keymaps and keybindings, major and minor modes, kill-and-yank instead of cut-and-paste, buffers, Emacs "windows" versus OS "windows", panes, prefix arguments).

The idea of having a gradual reveal of these features is a good one. But isn't that called the "emacs tutorial" and hasn't it been built into the editor for twenty years? ("C-h t"). Other people have argued that some of these features should be altered or compromised or disabled for new users -- it has been tried many times. I'm of the camp that hates this: You shouldn't screw up the carefully-designed semantics of emacs by installing Mac-style copy-and-paste. If you want to just visit the emacs world but aren't yet prepared to live there you should just go use TextMate or something in the meantime. It's not as if there are no alternatives.

The other, much larger portion of the learning curve is all the nonessential but incredibly powerful stuff that emacs can do: macros, customization, Dired-mode, shell-mode, hippie-expand, dabbrev, yasnippet, magit, Lisp interactive mode, gnus, org-mode, ido, Icicles, Zippy the Pinhead, Towers of Hanoi, blah blah blah. But it would take freaking forever to design a video-game-style walkthrough of all of that stuff, and the result would take forever to play through, and it would bore a lot of people because everyone's favorite 10% of the emacs universe is different.

I do think the emacs world would benefit from a lot more screencasts, but I'm not sure that going beyond that to game design is worth the trouble.
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they get the robots from a package with very basic moves, and they can then program a sequence of movemnts for the servos, requires lots of tuning and fine-tuning to get fighting moves. in my knowledge, the robots aren't sold in north america
What a bizarre, weird rant.
Sorry dude, that's not enough of a counter argument to eternity's evidence that separating content from presentation is A Good Thing.
It was actually accepted as a "poster" which is not a rigorous thing. I still think it's an embarrassment. This has been done before, and accepted as a full CS paper (search for "scigen").

The best example is the "Sokal affair" (search for "Alan Sokal") which is awesome because it doesn't just demonstrate sheer negligence with a randomly generated paper: it was carefully crafted to sound like it made sense.
The problem is: when do you unlock C-x C-n? I am sad to admit that I still never remember that set-goal-column exists. So the right time to unlock it for me seems to be "about ten years into the emacs experience".

OTOH, I've been using the rectangle commands (e.g. rectangle-open, rectangle-delete) since nearly the beginning. I like them and often find them handy. So for me the right time to unlock rectangles is "on the third week".

And so it goes. Everybody's use case is different. Everybody explores a different subset first. Everyone's idea of the most important emacs feature is different. This is quite unlike a game. One major reason that games use the gradual-unlocking strategy is to keep you interested in following their linear plot. But, after the first few days, emacs doesn't have a linear plot, and we probably don't really want it to.
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When I saw the title, I thought it would be about the information theoretic application of entropy, and talk about the maximum densities of useful work that can be expressed in a given number of characters. I further imagined the article talking about how abstractions are often good, and the move toward more expressive languages is in the large positive, but then exploring how it can be overdone like in the "Perl golf" exercise; and perhaps attempting to find a function or algorithm defining the optimal density for a balance between compactness and readability.

That'd be an interesting article.
Computer science has failed the pseudoscience test:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...
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Trossen Robotics (http://www.trossenrobotics.com/) has similar looking robot kits. They cost from $100-$1K+.
Unless it's radically different. There's a lot of cruft in Emacs (I mean, it has enough mass to pull things into orbit...), but little of that has anything to do with what makes Emacs fundamentally powerful: it's an emulated Lisp machine. I know I have a fierce minimalist streak, but I wonder what could be done with a new Emacs with a clean break - all of the mini-Emacsen I've seen (e.g. mg) have preserved the default keybindings (C-x C-f, C-n, etc.) but dropped the core extensibility. Perhaps the reverse would be more fruitful?

We haven't reached a dead end for editor (or interface!) innovation yet - look at ACME (http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/), for example. I don't like it (it's too mouse-centric for my taste), but it has quite a few interesting ideas, as does plan9. Probably, Emacs will absorb most interesting features from other editors instead ("worse is better" and all that), but good may come of questioning its assumptions.

I'm just trying to start some interesting discussion. Slow news because of the holidays, and all.
I've been using Macs since the 68k days and I have been waiting for this to happen. Apple makes, in my opinion, wonderful products, but they'd always been so niche and have to act that way. That meant product introductions at fan events (Macworld), outrageous pricing, etc. We're seeing that change and it's great. Apple is pushing products out when they're ready, their products are more competitively priced, they're more open than they have been in the past, they're selling through normal channels rather than exclusive retailers like they did in the past. . .

It's great!
Zed Shaw is the archetypal Rails proponent, and explains in full why Rails has such an uphill struggle to be accepted. It's as if being a Rubyist requires being a dick.
We also wouldn't have scoffed as much if she were merely three years older, and a boy, and working in PHP and Javascript instead of Microsoft technologies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156863

Can't we just congratulate the kid and move on? I mean, vital as it is to teach her that credentials are bullshit, can't we let her turn ten before breaking the bad news? She's already much closer to figuring it out for herself than I was at that age.
I just realized I'm a Zed fanboy! Thats either really cool, or totally wrong, but i cant decide, because of his "so over the top" internet image.
If it really was proof, you would cancel your exam.
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But don't you agree there are probably basic, useful editing commands you missed along the way?
Twisted by the Dark Side, Zed has become.
Its funny I like Zed. I think its healthy to have someone with his technical insight standing on the outside screaming "You're fucking DOING IT WRONG!".

Most won't pay him heed, but in some way the message gets through. (at least it gets decent distribution)
I would add one (IMHO) obvious omission: Infamous.

http://www.suckerpunch.com/detail.php/games/infamous
Paul Querna is one of the Apache httpd developers, so I think he's quite likely to go on using Apache, instead of the event based server du jour.
I've always thought that these certification programs were more of a game of trivial pursuit then a good gage of abilities.
> cultural differences mean that a guy in Mumbai cannot so easily start the next Amazon

Why do you think so?
Huh? He's all but sworn off Rails in favor of python frameworks.
I just realized that Zed could be _why's evil twin. They're both talented, well-known rubyists, and they're both fascinating to read, even if you don't really have any idea what they're talking about, but they seem diametrically opposed in personality.
Try working a shit 9-5 job for years on end. You can get bored almost immediately. If people started living for 200 years, do you think they'd keep retirement age at around 65?

The problem is the question makes no guarantee of the total quality of those extra years. Health is only part of that quality, actual happiness is another big part that wasn't assured.

200 years where 70%+ of it is spent in a crap job where you're ready to go home before you even show up? No thanks.

80 years where 70%+ of it is spent doing things that you actually like and can be proud of (not always necessarily at work)? Bring it on.
Sure. I just don't think that disabling all the other commands is necessarily going to help me find them.

And I think that, while a walkthrough is a good idea, a video-game-style walkthrough is more trouble to create than it's worth. I could be wrong, and anyone is welcome to build such a thing. But I'd recommend more screencasts first -- I sense that there's more bang for the buck there.
Great point about the explosiveness of transition periods -- the Renaissance comes to mind as well, powered both by new intellectual openness and the thuggish Medicis. But calling for "defamiliarization" with free speech sounds kind of horrible -- like putting us in jail for a while so we appreciate our freedom of movement.

But isn't the process of technological upheaval a continual defamiliarization of sorts, with people constantly changing modes and methods of communication with every new development? We don't need to be subjected to tyranny to be continually thrown off balance and required to innovate...
Also, what is basic will vary from user to user.

Grouping functionality by task in a way that would be simple to navigate would probably be a good start, though elisp doesn't really have a same namespacing system anyway. (Does XEmacs? I know it has a packaging system, but I use GNU Emacs.) Something like adding an alist or hash-table of symbols for task descriptions -> relevant functions, such as 'file, 'rectangle, 'email, 'basic wouldn't be too hard to retrofit onto the existing system. A bunch of redundancy wouldn't hurt, and a navigation system as in iswitchb or anything would probably work.

I'm busy with projects ATM, but I'd be interested in doing this...and aside from tagging existing stuff, it would be fairly quick. It could potentially be a newbie-friendlier version of apropos, because part of the problem with apropos is that you have to know general terminology in the first place.

If this already exists and I don't know about it...that might just prove my point.
2 out of 4 previous employers (I'm a freelancer now) gave me a raise whenever I passed an MCP exam. That's enough motivation for me, since it's not very hard to pass MCP exams (at least MSCD related ones) when you have decent practical experience.
Blame is wasted effort.

Agism (either way) can be legally hazardous.

Bailing out a failed business model is wasted investment.

Given your perception of the older folks, I'd suggest pursuing a business model based on catering to and profiting from those entitled boomers you appear to despise. But trust me on this one: some of those older folks are looking to profit from the perceptions of and the views of the younger folks, too.

Whether US-based or international, looking forward at what might change - what an upgrade from Acela to service competitive with TGV might mean, for instance - would be my preference. I'm looking at where I can improve, and how I can best deal with and can profit from the changes that are inevitably coming. At what and where the target is going to be. At what products and services I can milk or can sell off or can retire, too.

Changes are underway in the world economy. And I'd prefer to profit from both the "Xers" and from the "codgers" if I can manage it, as you'd termed these two large pools of potential consumers.

Blame? There's enough of that to go around.

Profit? Positioning for that in the current chaos is far more interesting.
I don't know...I rather take advantage of the public (while profiting) than complain about it (while not profiting).
This is what one has to do to stay relevant. As the times change, you adapt and keep creating value.
Charlie Rose - An hour with Bill Gates
Scarred for life. Someone should call child protective services.
Sorry, I was using 'defamiliarisation' in the context of the Russian critical readings of literature - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization - I can see how it takes on sinister overtones outside of this, and I have no idea how it can be done in practice, other than looking at examples of tyranny elsewhere, contemporaneously or historically, of which there are many.
There are certainly parallels between today's technological upheaval and say the English civil wars, when the printing press was being celebrated by people like Milton in similar terms - "as good as almost kill a man as kill a good book". I guess the point I'm getting at it is often the struggle that leads to the creativity - and thus why the Renaissance as you say is so interesting.
Yep, you read that correctly.
Have you read Zed's Rails is a Ghetto rant?

http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html
Oh, right, because HN is local to Sydney. How ignorant of me to not know that.
Yup... here's _why's take on Zed: http://hackety.org/2008/11/22/runningHot.html