skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems this comes from either:

1) Volcanoes
2) Methanogen microbes

Since no active volcanoes are around, the article posits the more likely explanation is the microbe one. Not sure the half life on methane. Could this methane be lingering from whenever volcanoes were last active? If so, the more parsimonious explanation is the volcano one. If the half-life of methane is too fast for the methane detected to be left-over methane from ancient volcanoes, and if further we are quite certain there are no active volcanoes there now, then perhaps the most parsimonious explanation for the methane would be methanogens living beneath underground ice. If we can rule out the volcano theory, then the next step would be to send Bruce Willis over there to drill for methane and the methanogens that produced it.
With regard to:

sqlConnection.Close();
sqlConnection.Dispose();
sqlConnection = null;

The irony is that the .NET Framework and it's compilers are very good at optimisation and will almost certainly make the object available for garbage collection at the first opportunity - with a good chance that the second two statements would not even make it into the assembly.
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome#Replication , second paragraph in the "Replication" section.
It's probably telling that I can't get the character to display properly in any interface... but whether of the practicality of the suggestion, or the level of my char-fu, I'm not sure.
Oasys - good name!
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what exactly does that imply?

Different people have to climb different staircases for success? How is that useful insight?
discusion is about if guido died, or how to make python less risky to business managers:
* create a (permissive?) standard? always out of date, slow, not slow
* create organization that provides support
Best Free Online Virus Scanners
Most of us are using anti virus these days, but some time your antivirus is not helpful with some Virus and Malware. In such situation, the best you can do is use something thatâ€™s free and fast. So am here posting 10 best Online Scanners which are free and easy to use.
Is Hardware Really Cheaper Than Humans?
A good read. I especially like the perspective of number 5.
The first part is definably PR for his book, but the rest is good clear, to the point writing that's better then 99% of the usual "What to do with your life" crap.
Methane doesn't come from volcanoes, or from organic life; it comes from primordial deposits of hydrocarbons from the formation of the planet, released by heating of the deposits or sublimation, or whatnot. If there is life, and it is carbon based, then it subsists on these deposits and the evolved methane might be a waste product. I think the speculation is way off in the stratosphere here. I think further analysis is called for before drawing any conclusions.

Further, there is always this to consider:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
haha. i can imagine the fights kids would get into trying to get the largest room or move the bear over the middle line (a la the movie brazil).
I think it is or will be soon enough. The internet made communication between geographically disparate developers so much easier. It's become mature enough that there are sites now where curious developers can congregate and exchange ideas.

When I started in the field the internet wasn't on the radar of businesses. Email accounts were uncommon never mind blog sites. Most book stores didn't carry books on academic topics. Besides, the wave of OO was just starting to gather so 9 out of 10 books were on OO or C++ or both.

Developers are now exposed to more and can share code and techniques. More complex problems are shared now causing curious developers to stretch their limits.

The largest problem I see now with adoption of Haskell is the us/them mentality of field trained developers vs. academically trained ones. I'm in the former group. While not all academically trained developers code/design well, the median one has been exposed to a wider range of coding problems and tools. Our ability to share ideas and problems on the internet levels that playing field if we let it.

In short, yes, mainstream developers are ready for Haskell/Lisp/OCaml/etc. We need to get over the "that's just for academics" mentality. They are tools, thought out by people with lots of brains and time on their hands, to solve problems. The only thing holding us back is our mentality.
http://appjet.com/
I always wonder as an engineer myself what kind of project these guys in overseas Google offices do; how do Google keep them happy? Is it just the fact that it is Google? That won’t be enough for me.

In my 12 years career so far I have always worked in startup or small companies where I have actual work to do. I have been to interview with big companies, they could not tell me what would the job bring me in terms of real work; I had always turned down offers from Google like folks.
(PRUG/PhRUG) Public Service 
[Google Groups] Philippine Ruby Users Group Public Service
I don't know how to type it yet, either... ;-) But it looks nice.
Dude, Where's My Job?
Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball to Shut Down
Thanks for the v. useful link (and like your website :)
Reminds me of the story of the economist, who finds a hundred dollar note on the ground: "Must be fake --- otherwise somebody would have already picked it up."
Well, there goes my business plan.
♳ ♴ ♵ ♶ ♷ ♸ ♹ ♺ ♻ ♲ ♼ ♽

Just copy+paste ;)

On OS X, you can enable the Character Palette which is extremely handly for inputting unicode.

Settings->International->Input menu->Character Palette[Check]
But you didn't feel valued.

That's a powerful feeling.

That leads to lots of people saying negative things.

Like saying people who are more emotional than you do not have value, because they made your way of being feel unimportant.

Do you see what I mean?
> "there are factors that need to be borne in mind if we are to come to a judgment that is not warped by the kind of partisan hysteria that has characterised this issue on both sides of the Atlantic. "

what is the bias of the author?
> the kindle is in fact not selling well.

Availability
Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is sold out. Please
ORDER KINDLE NOW to reserve your place in line. We
prioritize orders on a first come, first served basis.
Note that Kindles cannot currently be sold or shipped to
customers living outside of the U.S.
I actually thought this was an opinion piece for the onion.
The Valuation Blues (aka How FAS157 Is Tortuous)
Who Is Hosting This.com
What if all technologies were continuously replaced by newer technologies, and we all had to continuously learn just to stay current?
ps - this is even more important because the author fails to substantiate many of his claims. overall i think this article is just as sensationalist as what it purports against, which is a shame because it starts with an interesting perspective.
Reminds me of the fold-away apartment Bruce Willis occupies in "The Fifth Element".
Found via lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5130019/whoishostingthis-reveals-web-s...

Just one of those ah-HA ideas for a webapp, I know I've found myself wondering what host various sites use before.

The way internet is so amazing at resolving these little "uber geek I wonder how/why/who/what....." moments gets me so excited about these projects.
I wonder how many of those who demonize trade realize that high volumes of trade are associated with good economic times and low volumes of trade are associated with the opposite.
Subtle changes is Web architecture
Dear Paul Buchheit, Remember Me When You Do This.
sum ys = foldl' (+) 0 ys
See that in the context. It means there are no 7 single steps everybody can use to pursue their dream career and happiness. Or in other words: stop trivializing hugely complex things.
I always imaged how non-carbon based life form looks like. In fact our earth is a 'life' in a extended view, even the solar system, the whole universe. We humans are just a more advanced 'intellectual life'
looks like a square on my WinSvr2k8Std. Any screenshots?
This article is completely stupid and I can't imagine it will result in any useful discussion, only a flame war of stupidity. I'm not writing to say that I flagged it, though I did, but to state my opinion that when I want to read inflammatory political articles, I go to Reddit, not to YCNews.
Nope, just little blocks. Some interfaces display it as one solid dark monolith, some as empty squares, and a special few as festive little glyphs with mysterious markings inside. (XP SP2, every browser under the sun and then some.)
Jared Spool is also a fantastic speaker. If you ever get a chance to see him give a talk (e.g., at a SIGCHI meeting), by all means do.
Still, I wonder if Alfie Kohn accepts sincere praise as payment for all of his consulting gigs...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol

Of course this doesn't give you the full experience of unicode! But that is in fact what it is.
I like Gravy.
> "In the C programming language, you're regularly forced to deal with the painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. "

> "I'd wager the majority of programmers alive today have never once worried about malloc(). I call this progress..."

Anger. Must... resist... anger.

I've come to believe that Jeff Atwood is on a personal mission sent by God himself to piss me off.

Just remember, Jeff: every time you fire up that pretty C# code of yours, and make all your little variables through your ORM, letting the garbage collector clean up the mess you've made and then proceed to pump out those cute little web pages through your cute little templating language, to be sent off to some other computer through some magic wire to some magic browser to be rendered... that thousands and thousands of programmers (who, it should be noted, are almost all still alive, today) worrying about "dangerous" and "painful" concepts like pointers have slaved to make your silly little ORM, your database, your templating language, your network stack, your web browser, your web server, and your operating system.

As I've said before, some of us are in the trenches worrying about all the "dangerous" stuff, like pointers. The primary difference between you and I, though, is that I actually know you exist. I don't believe that at some point in the mid 80's, a network stack and a file system (each created in the "before time") really really loved each other and out popped a web server.
Automatic Game Design
Python has a large community and the culture of that community has a lot of cohesion around the Python philosophy. DHH once commented (in the Snakes and Rubies event with Adrian of the Django bunch - http://www.djangoproject.com/snakesandrubies/ Q&A part) that it's in the early days that culture/style/direction needs to be defined. After a while, the people who are a part of the project are those that like that style.

There's lots of people in the Python community today and they're in it not to redefine Python, but because they like what Python is. Sure, there will always be differences of opinion, but overall the people involved with Python are because they like it and want to see it thrive.
If the wealth gain was less sudden, i.e. if it was less conspicuous, people wouldn't complain as much. So the speed is definitely related to the happiness of others, because it's a relative, societal judgment. Furthermore, the one complaining here (the article) was, I believe, a bystander. It's more a reflection on income disparity than quality of life.

But I agree with you.
Other than Youtube, what Google acquisitions have worked out?

Anecdotally, companies seem to rot away after getting acquired by them.

Gogo talent acquisitions.
Are you familiar with the Albania example? I wish the author elaborated more on it.
Uh, oh - politics.

Here's my problem with this predictive summary: Choosing Iraq meant lost opportunities in Afghanistan and, even, Pakistan. Worse, it was an on-going, five-year, choice even after the initial assessments (WMDs and troops required) were proven wildly wrong. The surge, for Bush, was a last resort, when it should have been first, second, or even third. It's not that folks opposed the surge. They just thought it was two or three years too late.

Then there were the choices to build a huge, new and repetitive bureaucracy (DHS), to give out massive tax cuts in a time of "war" without commensurate sacrifices from the American people (e.g., gas tax), and to belittle whatever moral and legal superiority our society is supposed to offer by torturing people. The choices for the economy were made in response to catastrophe not as it became increasing clear something was wrong. So the bailout packages end up being far bigger than if the problem had been addressed with true leadership.

See, that's my problem with Bush. He just wasn't a democratic leader in any sense of the those terms. There was no effort to reconcile differing opinions, foment and shape debates, and arrive at conclusions that we could get behind. It was decisions (from the gut) first and rationalization after the fact with a brow-beaten, and slim, majority in Congress merely signing purchase orders.

Four more days...
"What took us a weekend to do, has taken 18 months here."
How to Ensure Your Employees Don’t Care About Their Job, But Stick Around Anyway
I don't think he is saying pointers et al. aren't important. Consider the Whitehead quote: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Even so, I imagine that most garbage collection proponents still think people should learn about pointers and GC, just not use them (unless there is a good reason to).
Under Linux you can enable the compose key, with setxkbmap -option "compose:rwin"

This lets you prefix digraphs with rwin, and have them print unicode characters. This is (to some extent) configurable, although I am not sure on the location of the mapping.

EDIT: Some examples (default settings):
ä ç ß ¢ £ ½ ⅓ ¼ ⅙ ⅛ » « ¥ õ ° — – º
I hope Steve gets well soon. I'm afraid if he leaves Apple again, we'll see a repeat of the slow slide they experienced from 1985-1998.
sadly trutap.com made lots of its staff redundant :(

Doug is based in Cambridge, UK [where I am, too]. Am tempted by Cambridge Angels, might have to ask around YC and see if anyone has any experiences.
Agree. But with a title like "What Should I Do with My Life, Now?," an article should offer some more insight than just saying the road to success is extremely complex. I realize he is differentiating himself from other self-help books that offer sure-shot 8 steps to success or whatever. But still, I, naively perhaps, expected something more insightful and inspirational.
Picasa and Blogger haven't been total failures. Urchin has spawned the very widely used Google Analytics. Writely became Google Docs. Postini still operates and has significantly lower fees now.

Google does have a pretty bad history with some acquisitions, but some have worked.
It sounds like the basics of capitalism to me - I imagine most companies would like their users to consume more, no?
You're right; deleted.
If the article was intended to be self-aggrandizing PR for his book, I don't think he would have included this line:

Note that the article offered no economic or statistical evidence to back this suggestion up; it was pure theory, with a few individual case studies that proved nothing, merely illustrated the concept.

I found the numbered points at the end quite insightful.
Wow this is very interesting but makes perfect sense. People just don't like registering for websites.
With OS X you take beautiful fonts for granted sometimes...
Because the institutions are shaped to serve the majority of their customers.
I know its somewhat trendy to pick on Jeff Atwood, but I don't really know what you're getting angry about.

He never said that malloc and free are irrelevant.
And manual memory management is dangerous and painful. Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that.

That a majority of programmers today don't have to worry about it is, in fact, progress.
I haven't dealt with this stuff in some time, but I recall that those last two statements are actually needed. I think it was a work-around for a bug\design-flaw in the earlier .NET garbage collector.

That last bit on explicitly assigning to null was really weird but in some cases, necessary.
That's the advantage of the sort of analysis in this article, though - testing ideas by looking at other web sites is almost like implementing them yourself and then evolving.

This article and comments came at a good time for me just now - I'm working on a cart thing and trying to answer some of the same questions. One area I'm worried about - patents. As if good UI and software development wasn't hard enough, the whole patent mess makes it much more complicated. Aside from technical limitations, from a legal standpoint what can I do and what can I not do? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-click
That was the line 10 years ago that I heard, "You go to college to learn how to think logically."

Don't you think that if you haven't learned that at all by 18, you won't learn it in the next 4 years surrounded by equally ignorant kids?

But, speaking of the topic, how many colleges these days require courses in rhetoric?

I sat in on a bunch of college sophmore classes when I was 14 and 15, even wrote some of my friend's English papers for them, on books I had never even read. I wasn't impressed. And this was a "good state university" as someone else mentioned.
This is intriguing news. From the article:

Recent animal studies have shown that clioquinol - an 80-year old drug once used to treat diarrhea and other gastrointestinal disorders - can reverse the progression of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. [...] Researchers at McGill University have discovered a dramatic possible new answer: According to Dr. Siegfried Hekimi and colleagues at McGill's Department of Biology, clioquinol acts directly on a protein called CLK-1, often informally called "clock-1," and might slow down the aging process. [...]

"Because clock-1 affects longevity in invertebrates and mice, and because we're talking about three age-dependent neurodegenerative diseases, we hypothesize that clioquinol affects them by slowing down the rate of aging." [...]

"The danger is that you can buy a kilogram of this compound at a chemical wholesaler, but we don't want people to start experimenting on themselves. Clioquinol can be a very toxic substance if abused
Okay! Okay!

It's killing me.

"Gravy Sucking" should be "Gravy-Sucking"

There.

I feel better now.
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer using "RT" as it's pretty easy to type, it's in popular usage on Twitter (so no need to explain the crazy recycling symbol), plus it's only one extra letter
Are iPhone apps fool's gold for developers?
The word "educate" comes from "educe," to pull forth. That's not how universities work any more.

Anyway, you'd be surprised at how many successful people in all kinds of fields do not have a degree, or don't have a degree in the field they're in.

They just don't make the news as often (cough except for Richard Branson cough). You're right that there's a selection bias, but you missed the other selection bias.
Embattled Palm charges back with webOS
Yeah. Ubuntu marketing says, We make Linux Easy. And mostly this is true. But here, they opted for using the latest and greatest technology (pulse) rather than old and known to work everywhere (alsa) because of developer pressure, in a supposedly LTS version that huge numbers of people are going to use.

I view this is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, ubuntu screwup.
Apple's Jobs taking leave of absence
This programmer shows a lot of temper; I won’t hire him.

I once worked with a guy from Ukraine who use to swear in his native language at office, trust me it’s not nice. It’s disruptive and ultimately non productive for the programmer and others around.
And Keyhole to the list.
Right. Sorry.
"But still, I, naively perhaps, expected something more insightful and inspirational."

Yep, it is naive to expect to find a useful, insightful answer to "What Should I Do with My Life, Now?" in a short article on the web. Instead of trying to actually answer the question, Bronson points out why a lot of glib answers to the question are wrong. Maybe a little bait and switch with the title, but useful nonetheless.
Django's ORM gets aggregate support
This is perhaps one of the most astonishingly vacuous article I have ever read in my entire life. What was is about, exactly? A funny function name? Not to mention that 70% of it is quotes from other people. Pure link bait.
> Darcs, at least, broke new ground. It was a very innovative VCS.

Innovative does not mean valuable, or, more important, popular.

I proposed the theory that languages become popular because they make creating new things possible and/or easier.

If Darcs qualifies as such a new thing, the fact that it didn't help popularize haskell argues against my theory.

Maybe my theory is wrong. (I'd certainly patch it in certain ways.) Maybe Darcs doesn't qualify. Maybe Darcs didn't do the trick because no one knows about it.

So, let's flip the question. What has the Haskell community done that has been important in making other languages popular in the past? If they're not doing any of those things, why should Haskell nevertheless become popular? (Note that lots of "superior" languages never became popular, so if you're going that route, you get to explain why Haskell will be different.)
The word "educate" comes from "educe," to pull forth.

Also related is the word "eduction", as in "the eduction of relations and correlates", Charles Spearman's definition of acting intelligence (1927). http://www.google.com/search?q=eduction+relations+correlates...
> He never said that malloc and free are irrelevant.

It would be a good point if it was true.

Jeff's basically said as much going as far as calling C an "obsolete" language and saying it is not worth learning. He said he doesn't know C and sees no reason to learn it. Is that not the definition of calling malloc and free irrelevant?
One of the comments was probably better than the actual article:

http://blog.macleans.ca/2009/01/14/dude-where%E2%80%99s-my-j...
Mines 100358785

I really suck at this game, I'm level 7 but I keep running out of money, and I loose most fights! Very addictive though, checking it every 5 mins now, hopefully I can break away else I'm not going to get anything done!!
Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that.

I've written tens of thousands of lines of C and maintain a codebase of over 50KLOC. I also am a somewhat less active maintainer on another project with almost 400KLOC. And I would strongly disagree with that, so you shouldn't make wide generalizations like "anyone."

I have devoted probably less than an hour of my time out of over a year of development on this codebase to memory management. I have never understood why people think it is so hard to call free() a couple times when your program shuts down.

At least in my experience, if you're finding memory management to be "hard", your program is structured in a bad way to begin with. Your program shouldn't be covered in mallocs and frees.