skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried... from the site:

Read other people's tweets and others will read yours.

Your attention priority goes up as you score points reading other people's tweets and goes down as people read your tweets.

The higher your attention priority relative to other people, the more often your tweets will be viewed by others.
Because it's connected to your twitter account and twitter doesn't have OAuth yet. I don't want to ask people for their twitter password.
Eliza reminds me of a "character" (the smart computer) in a book called Death Match by Lincoln Child.

Story in a nutshell, minus spoilers: programmer creates a brilliant "matching algorithm" (on the Eliza-Like machine) that pairs people with unprecedented success rates. And then one day those couples start dying.

Great read; highly recommended. The Douglas Preston / Lincoln Child team writes some excellent books, if you're a lover of Crichton-type SciFi with a more technical aspect.

P.S. http://www.prestonchild.com/solonovels/child/deathmatch/inde...
To be honest I haven't seen much. I've been abroad lately, but in my first couple of years I heard very little.

I haven't lived in a startup hub, so I can't really give a valid comparison.
Even if it did matter while picking one (and I don't see how), a more useful comparison would be a time-since-framework-release weighted number of books (sort of like HN ranks)
Not quite the same, in this article pretty much all of the books are teaching Rails. The link you provided shows a different Java technology for each book. You only need one of the books to learn Rails.
Or about test subjects that are encouraged or required to call the scientist/experimenter Mom or Dad in order to foster familial or subordinate behavior. I guess that would be mostly useful in psychological tests though.
I'm pretty sure "a text editor that bitches at you and won't let you type incorrect stuff" isn't the answer and I'm pretty sure "a text editor in which clippy pops up and is like "you seem to have forgotten a parentheses. Can I help you figure out where to put it" isn't the answer, either; if I had an inkling about what a good ui would be I'd tell you or be working on this myself, but I don't have any real insight beyond what I've shared.

You might want to start by getting a list together of the various refactorings / simple structure transforms you encounter a lot in eg the lisp you write, and then figuring out what the best keyboard interface would be just for manually inputting a sequence of those transformations.
Affiliate links to amazon?

This has got to be the lamest excuse for posting a bunch of amazon links I've seen in a while. Usually there's at least some pretense of "reviewing" the titles.
Thanks a lot for the feedback (and to everyone else too). I'm going to try both of those ideas when I get home from work.
Additionally, professor wages are among the most compressed. At my university, it is often cheaper to keep on professors who are old enough to retire, instead of hiring fresh talent.
CURL on GoDaddy issue - any techie explanation?
Messes to Successes
It is possible, not specially hard, I implemented a Turing machine and a one-dimensional cellular automaton. You can program just about anything in a spreadsheet. I will later study the inner properties of the spreadsheet as a data structure and a programming paradigm.
Very interesting article. I definitely think that there are many interesting trends in/on Twitter that we've never really seen before. The spam-free nature of Twitter is especially interesting.
There are opportunity costs. If I buy a hard drive that I never use I could have bought shares of amazon instead. By your definition, money could never be wasted or used inefficiently. If I waste money and my competitor does not, then it's not economically sustainable for me.
I'm talking about the US.

To be clear, in California at least, you can be fired or quit for any or no reason whatsoever. So, yes, to correct what I said, an employer could fire you for sharing your salary, or for the car you drive, or for the color of your hair, or just because they don't like you for no specific reason. (But not for your gender, race, disabilities, or religion. Doesn't that seem odd?)

However, very few employers will fire you for this. And, if they're that serious about keeping their employees in a disadvantageous position, maybe you ought to find a more respectful employer.
I actually program with a navy blue background in some languages and a white background in others. With ruby, python I have a blue background in vim and with xhtml, css, and javascript I use a white background.
Very impressive how slow he got the plane to go.

He used ground-effect to ride the plane on a cushion of air. http://news.google.com/news?q=%22ground%20effect%22
Probably not, or at least not a truly complete list. Did you try to search for the answer yourself first? Did you try Google-ing it?

Here is a start: http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm

Just curious: Why would you want such a list? What is it's purpose?
I agree with you. The author is not a 'he', though.
like a painter who doesn't know when the painting is done, it would be a good article without the last sentence.
I didn't say the editor would bitch at you for entering incorrect stuff, it's that for a lot of things it would be impossible to enter incorrect stuff by design and it would make editing easier and faster, not harder. If the only way to enter parentheses into your s-expressions is to invoke the open-sexp command by pressing the appropriate key, it's impossible that you'll forget a parenthesis or have them nested improperly (unless the nesting is syntactically correct). Correspondingly, to delete an element such as an s-expression you'll invoke the "delete-element" command so it's impossible that you'll just delete the last parenthesis of an s-expression without deleting the rest of it.
The cheap iteration is a big plus of this data structure over a simple set.
Buffer Overflow: a SF story about the AI box
Surf Through Google Earth
Steve Wozniak on Steve Jobs's health
I think the article misses the point of Captcha's, and I think he's incorrect in his conclusion because of that.

The site is actually written by a woman, Amy Hoy. I think it's a good sort of historical introduction into the issue for someone who doesn't know anything about it, but the article really doesn't seem to impart anything new to those who do.

I gather Amy Hoy is primarily a graphic designer who also does some dev work. I think most of the content on her site reflects this. As a person who has the same kind of split focus in a lot of their work, I have sometimes found content on her site interesting.
Someone smart enough to do "cutting edge" code, but not smart enough to know they getting screwed? Dude's watched Rain Man one too many times.

Incidentally he mentions that he's using mod_lisp so this is probably a website... Anyone got a URL?
People often accidentally a whole word from their sentences intentionally for humorous effect. Maybe not the best test of whether someone's read a tweet...
Goddamnit, Now I'm writing rules in my head!
> It certainly is an interesting ad. Horrifically interesting

It reminds me of this apartment rental ad from Craigslist -- http://consumerist.com/5130759/worst-apartment-rental-ad-eve...
Optimism is the cure for the downturn
This article explains it: http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple's Lisa
Another:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439447
I’ll write about why this matters tomorrow.

As the author hopes we forget about his post before he has to write about why it matters. They're both good frameworks. Rails has more books for a number of reasons:

* It's been around longer. It also achieved API stability sooner. Not that Django had an unstable API, but there were big changes for longer (such as newforms). So, Rails has lent itself to having books written about it for a lot longer and has gone through many revisions since the books started coming out.

* Django has better documentation. Sure, Rails has its guides section and api-doc, but Django's documentation tends to be better than multiple books. So, there's been less of a push for books. Also, with Adrian and Jacob (the co BDFL of Django) having put a free book out there at djangobook.com, it means dead-tree books are likely to make less money.

* The Django community is smaller. Smaller means less people buying books, means less books written.

This post is the ultimate in link-bait. What's next: Why Java is better than Lisp: curly braces! I'll write more on that later ;-)
I would argue than universal healthcare is a good candidate. By this table one might expect a drop in healthcare costs from 15% of the GDP to 10%, which is 700 billion a year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care#Economics
Filmed in the manner of Bourne Ultimatum. They seriously need a steady-cam.

Other than that, it was interesting. Although it was mainly a recap of this: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...
I don't get it. Is the point that Rails is better because it has more books, or that Django is better because it doesn't have so many shitty books? (yes, I am judging them by their covers)
I would be careful about eggs, yolks are full of cholesterol. Having few eggs per week seems to be ok, but don't base your "healthy diet" primarily on eggs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_(food)#Health_issues_of_eat...
If this is 01 what is 00? Learning to count with arrays?
What can we do to aid his death along a little faster and make it a little more painful for the lying deceitful bastard? Here's hoping that he dies painfully and that Mactintosh follows soon behind. I bought a Macbook Pro. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. Doing anything creative (video editing, multi-track recording,) or anything else for that matter, is much easier and faster on a Windows or Linux-based P.C. Macintosh is all marketing and no substance. Anybody want to buy my $3,000+ paperweight MacBook pro? Anybody drink the Steve Jobs koolaid and actually think their computers and operating system are anything short of complete garbage? hmmmm ? You can buy mine in mint condition for pennies on the dollar. Get it the hell out of my life. Don't even get me started on the piece of crap the iPhone. Anybody who thinks it is revolutionary, the first of its kind or unique is clearly out of touch with reality and wireless market.
"The Universe is a Giant Hologram" -or- "The Universe is a Metaphor"
I like a white background. The color schemes for black backgrounds always seem to be off for one color or another.
The philosophies are very different. You have:

1. Low hanging fruit (business) vs. high hanging fruit (science). Businesses can not pursue leads which may only have long time payoffs.

2. Only leads with visible benefit are pursued by business. Whereas science believes that discoveries may have benefits far beyond any visible benefit.

Thus if a society ditches research without any immediate benefits academics believe society would advance much slower.
John Romero on the Making of Doom
What an interesting question. Well, as the post mentions, we have three sectors: public (government), private (business), and social (non-profit).

Does a society need all three to thrive? Yes. Government is the entity entrusted with creating the currency. Private business is entrusted with assigning value to that currency, creating "wealth" through competition. Efficient enterprises create wealth better than inefficient ones.

And out of it all, the social sector is . . . well, I can't quite figure out what the social sector is supposed to accomplish, but people do like causes. Most "causes," if they're able to claim fulfillment of a goal that the public sector could but doesn't, seem to revel in the fact that they're doing for society what government could/should do, all the while claiming to lack the motivations of the private/business sectors.
Sure, I was just enumerating obviously-wrong implementation ideas, not suggesting that's what I thought you were doing.

What I was getting at is thinking of a structure editor as a text editor + extras might be a dead end, but I don't have any bright ideas for you as to what user-interface approach wouldn't be a dead end.

Actually hold up, I have a possibility for you before I get back to the game. I could see maybe a case for a split-screen (split vertically into 1+N panes), where your currently-under-edit block is always in the (user-set fixed-size) pane, and the remaining options are like this (quasi-lisp):

+----active pane----+
(define (exponentiate x y) |)
+----first suggestion pane----+
[open-sexp] (define (exponentiate x y) (|))
+----second suggestion pane----+
[delete-sexp] (define |)
+----third suggestion pane----+
[swap-args] (define (exponentiate y x) |)

etc., with the basic metaphor being:

The top pane has the current version of what you're working on.

Each pane underneath it shows the result of applying one of the higher-level operations (like open-sexp or delete-sexp).

For small syntax edits (like adding a matched pair) this mode is overkill; for fancier operations (invert nesting over some complicated structure) this makes it easy to visualize what you're going to get from each command.

That's it, got to get back to the game. Good luck with your endeavors on this project; a better editor is a worthy cause.
That was a very useful thread with very tangible effects on my cooking. It started me on the whole "1000 variations of rice and beans" thing :).
That link makes my point more succinctly. Thanks.
Conference Sponsorship: Worth It?
I've considered switching to dvorak or colemak or otherwise, but the main thing that always holds me back is emacs. Have any of you emacs users out there used an alternate layout? What was/is your experience with it?
Indeed. I imagine they get all their work done during the "probationary period," then refuse the person at the last moment and repost the ad. (I think I could build basically any software you wish using well-divided piecework prepared as "tests." Anyone want to take the bet?)

Actually, thinking about it, I could probably hide bomb trajectory calculations in public school math curricula as well. It sort of reminds me of steganography, or of the Manhattan project...
I was thinking about switching, so googled up on it a bit, and found this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/455525/is-the-switch-to-d...

What do people here think? Is it worth the time investment to switch?
Could you elaborate?

Read My Tweets is a symmetric site. All the users are tweeters advertising to each other.
We had an epic email that got sent company wide and asked for donations to a church (complete accident; blame stupidity over malice). Took down the email servers for ~24 hours.

Note: 6000+ employee company
Jim Davis says he approves, but stealing from one Jeremy Parsih, http://www.gamespite.net/verbalspew/archives/archive_2008-m0...:

"Then again, Davis is a shrewd businessman above all else. I guess it's possible he appreciates someone's poking holes in his life work in creative ways, but more likely he simply realized that letting someone publish a book that transforms his comic into depressing absurdism is the holiest of grails: A means by which to sell Garfield to people who hate Garfield."
I've never seen anyone eat potatoes as is. Sour cream, bacon, cheese, and chili: a proper baked potato.
Really? I never had that problem. I started out using Notepad++'s default coloring (black on white). Then I switched to Vim and used a dark background. Switching between dark and light background has never been a problem for me.

Could you elaborate more on your situation? Did you always use a dark background? What are the conditions around where you code?

Light grey on black for me is still too hard to see. I prefer pure black and white. On the Windows Command Prompt, I set the default color to 0F instead of the default.

My concern is not so much with a dark/light scheme, but with color contrast.

Currently, I use Vim with a dark colorscheme ('desert') and I love it. My friend, Aaron, also uses a dark colorscheme.

However, my other friend, Brian C., has an affinity for light backgrounds. Whenever I show him code on any dark colorscheme, his first response is to make it white. Then again, that is his normal setup; that is what he always deals with.
Cool Google Chrome hacks
The Best Portable Applications
Having tried dvorak, I still find myself liking qwerty better. It just feels more.. right, to me.

Different strokes, I guess!

(Plus, my WPM is already plenty good. I can hit over 100WPM.)
Ask HN: Test the market using Facebook / iPhone
I am looking to launch an application / website and was thinking if i can gain traction on Facebook or iPhone it would more likely be successful as a stand alone site

What are some others thoughts on testing the market and do you agree?
or they are just trying to get a lot of work done for free. Pick a dozen developers, have each work the 10 hours, hard work too, since the people would be working their ass off trying to make a good impression....then tell them "Sorry you didn't live up to our standards".

Not likely though, since then they'd offer to pay more than the minimum wage
I use light background. I feel like I have to. Any time I switch from light text to dark text it takes time for my eyes to adjust. So when I'm looking up documentation etc everything need to be the same. Even the bar at the top bothers me. SO I use the black on white.
The Outlook and Exchange teams stress test their systems with the following Microsoft distribution lists: internz, gmrchat, failboat, lolcats, and bacon
Without knowing what your application does, it's likely you're not going to get very good advice.
Zed Shaw talked a lot about building a ruby based rules engine / document management system here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420650
I'm not sure why you don't think I could get a sales guy who owns a chunk of the company. Also conservative, non-ad revenue based products have a better chance of getting investment than the latest chance to make revenue from web services via the oversaturated ad sales market.

But thanks!
As an Aussie I'd love #2.

Not just for the prices, but for all the stuff that we can't buy anywhere here!

How about a service like this:
I give you my credit card details and I get a name/address.

So anytime I need to order something online, it goes to:
Mr 12345, Your Address here, 90210,

Whenever something for Mr 12345 comes into your warehouse - you slap my address sticker on it, and ship it off to me. (Charging my CC $10 plus postage).
I would really be interested in seeing attrition rates for engineers and non-engineers. Sales guys are the revenue producers almost anywhere else, and as such, are favored in the way that Google stereotypically favors their engineers. I know that this was the Kirkland office, as well, and there's always something about moving from HQ to a satellite office that's probably captured in the sentiment expressed.
That sneaky sonofabitch!

RoR obviously gained some massive popularity. However I don't understand why Django did not gain as much as RoR did. Python is a damn good language, which by the way is gaining some momentum due to google's big fat presence with the app engine.

So why is Ruby so popular? To be honest I am actually pretty unhappy with ruby (don't give me any more one-liner ruby scripts or I will bitch-smack yo ass) with how easy it is to make that language unreadable compared to say... python.

I work with a web server built in javascript and can tell you that with a loosely structured dynamic language it is horribly easy even for decent programmers to make unreadable code.
Belkin replies to Mechanical Turk shilling
1 point by jbarciauskas 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

To better understand the position Scott's referring to here, I recommend reading this Joel Spolsky article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000034.html Of course, Spolsky was a program manager at Microsoft in the same time frame as Scott.
I can understand why a cult of this sort would be incredibly fragile. This sort of position has to be the absolute hardest position to hire for. We have all read about and/or experienced the difficulty of hiring a good engineer, but being a great engineer requires a well-definted set of skills - a strong understanding of and demonstrated experience with technical topics. A program manager, or a functional lead as they are called in many other contexts, has to have a blend of the technical and fuzzy skills that are almost impossible to identify, because the proper blend is very ill-defined.

A great program manager may not be able to write quicksort in Lisp off the top of his head, but should have a strong comptuer science foundation and understand the implications of various technical choices. At the same time, the program manager has to be able to communicate options and choices between team members with differing views, help structure the discussions around those options and bring everyone to a consensus as to the correct path to follow. The program manager must be gregarious and active in stimulating communication, but without that technical edge he will lose all credibility with his team.

By virtue of having these skills, however, as Joel argues, the program manager is able to drastically improve the productivity of everyone around him, but without having x lines of code or other quantifiable metrics to show for it, other than "shipped on time".

It is not hard to see how a position like this could fall out of the A people hiring other A people and into the B people hiring C people trap quickly.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Strange - I've been using black (lately w syntax coloring) text/white background since I was first able to (early '80s - VT100 days) after using white on black for most of the 70's.
I enjoyed the picture but:

Struts cookbook? Well thats not a requirement. There is the RoR cookbook. Add that to the pile.

IF you are making an xml-based external web service I don't care what language you still write the XSLT to give out as a public api. So thats another one to the ruby pile.

Struts in action? There are 2 learn struts books in that pile.

In any case if you think more than a few seconds about that image you will cut down the java side and incraese the ruby side to equalibrium.
I have always had a problem with django documentation. It's bad. I struggled for a long time with django figuring out what I could do on my own, but the problem isn't simply on the community size, or the number of books, it's also the type of people involved. There's a number of people whom don't want to see it change/grow and that's where I found it frustrating. I don't think you can expect more books to be written about it as a result because many want to keep it niche. It's a great framework otherwise and the changes made in the 1.0 release were awesome. Django is great b/c it allows for full leverage of python. The patch to python only made it that much better too. Django doesn't bake everything in so it's super simplistic in nature. However, I'm now a rails coder and I find scaffolding dumb so I'll switch to merb soon.Working outside in is for the birds, but where the jobs are and better books.

Last point, documentation in my mind winds the race... but community is just as important. The kinda of people you attract etc.. Maybe django will get better in the future and not everything in everybook and documentation will explicitly assume you to be an expert.
Praise the lord! Technically jesus is better than everything then.

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1232320070/ref=sr_nr_i_2?ie=UTF8...

Damn Jesus beats porn but only by 8 times! (40,491) We have ways to go people! Lets make more porn books!