skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks interesting, but I think you'd ideally have the familiarity of the Lego product else it looks like a cheap rip-off.

Minecraft on 360 is the experience they'd want to aim for. Buy, download, jump in and play. Seems like such a no-brainer to me. Wonder how Lego botched their Universe (mentioned by T-A) play?
I did something by doing nothing as in not purchasing a new HD since september. Apart from that what can we do?
I've been using Sean's previous window manager, musca[1], since early 2009 and love it. Interesting to see what else he's come up with!

I just read through the tutorial and in a lot of ways this is very like musca. Similar commands (some are identical, in fact), similar config file etc. It also looks more flexible and powerful than musca! I will definitely be trying this out. Perhaps I've found my new WM...

[1] http://aerosuidae.net/
I am currently fine with the amount I make, even though it's pretty low for my field. I've designed my lifestyle around what I can support financially, not the other way around.

Money rarely makes people happy. Stuff that money can buy is where they find happiness.

To me, more money equals security for the future. I often struggle to buy new things, constantly rationalizing why I should save rather than spend. These types of transactions don't make me happy.

I do find happiness spending money on trips or events though, as the article indicates.
I liked your post, and agree with it.

Instead of arguing about whether ethical statements are meaningful given the lack of an explicitly chosen ethical system, we could just try to think about what systems are compatible with the claims you made.

Utilitarianism seems to back up your argument just fine, since you suggest that you don't object to using powerful addiction techniques in principle, which suggests you're not being deontological -- you care mainly about real-world results.

Presumably you'd be much more accepting of Zynga-style gamification when used to encourage things like Wikipedia editing, or to motivate successful weight loss. You suggest that what actually matters is the consequences on someone's life and time of using these techniques, which is a consequentialist argument.

So, while you haven't committed to using a utilitarian framework, I think that users posting here who want to talk about moral framework assumptions could start by assuming utilitarianism and asking whether your conclusion makes sense. Seems like it does to me; it's not easy to imagine Farmville (or anything with similarly cynical intent) as a net positive on the world.
Groovicon.com - Give your users an avatar with Groovicon.
Hardening node.js for production: using nginx to avoid load
Mac cost perhaps a grand five years ago, still running fine. So about $200 a year. Meanwhile cheaper laptops I have used die a quicker death as they are not built as well, apparently. So my guess is that they are roughly equivalent.
Ok, define "hurting religious feelings", and we'll talk.

Keep in mind that anybody can invent any religion at any point.
Predicting the State of the Financing Market in 12 Months
As someone who is interesting in writing more Haskell, I've heard all the "if I get it to compile it works perfectly the first time", and I wonder if people are missing out on what proper TDD can bring them.

At first TDD becomes a way to assert your code does what you expect. After a few years you begin to use it as a design technique, and the correctness argument becomes less and less of a reason for using it. It's more of an (albeit nice) side effect at that point. I can write code that I test after the fact and still get the same correctness benefits, but the feedback I get from testing my design is gone.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't know if just having an excellent type checker is enough to provide the same quality feedback loop as well executed TDD does.
Apache Wave is alive and well. BTW, I think we can stop calling it Google Wave :-)

I run Apache Wave on my laptop just to kick the tires and I had it on a server for a while so I could ask a few people to try it with me. It is an instant install and run from either the svn or mirrored git repo, if you use the default file store. Configuring it with MongoDB as a data store takes some more effort.
Impermanent Data Apps: Newest Weapons in War For Messaging
A link that doesn't require login:
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/busslab/pdffil...
If you want to teach someone go, give them an insane handicap to start with. I am only a mediocre player, but I'll play on a 9x9 board and hand out a 9 stone handicap. More than half the time I'll win, then I'll give them a couple of tips. (Unless you're connecting your stones in a solid wall, play 1 space away from me to avoid tactical tricks. Also don't try to kill my stones, just try to build a wall that I can't get through.) Then they usually win.

People often resist accepting the handicap. So I point out that the game has a more complex strategy than anything they have ever seen. The handicap is a necessary part of the game. If they can't accept this fact, then they will never learn or enjoy the game.

Once they are beating me easily with a 9 stone handicap, we start dropping the handicap down one stone per game. Somewhere about 5-6 stones they will hit a wall again. Then I can give more tips and we go to the "adjust the handicap after 3 victories in a row". Over time they start seeing more of what is going on.

Once they get down to a 3 stone handicap on a 9x9 board, then I give them a 9 stone handicap on a 13x13 board. Now they can feel that they are really playing, and start to see how varied it is.

If you're trying to teach yourself, I recommend taking a game like GNU go and doing it yourself. Crank up the handicap to 9 on a 9x9 board, and try to win. Slowly drop the handicap. If you can get someone to give you tips, do. You will improve and can see it in the handicaps you need.
No, Javascript is not "just scheme" with a few bad design decisions. They have significant differences.

Scheme has:

call-with-current-continuation http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_8.html#IDX509
Tail Call Optimisation
A numeric tower http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_8.html#SEC50
A Code/Data equivalence and therefore macros
Ports

Javascript has:

Prototypal inheritance
Every 'object' is mutable bag of string indexed properties

There's a pile of differences, even just at the semantic level before you get into the syntax or the equivalence semantics.

I understand that if you take a specific subset of javascript, you can write code as-though it has some scheme semantics (minus call/cc and TCO), but that's true to a similar extent of any language with lexical scope, closures and anonymous functions.
I'm currently trying to get into the freelancing gaming. This article and the comments here have been very helpful! Thanks everyone. :)
I'm searching for the tl;dr?
Another wish to add to that: independence from any one cloud provider. So if amazon has a power failure, or Dropbox gets asked to turn off your account, or MegaCloud gets raided by your favorite 3-letter acronym, all your files are still there. And you did not need to upload your data 3 times (in other words, there is a protocol where cloud providers sync their data for you).

Not sure if this is technically feasible, though - for example, what happens if an interceptor gets hold of service 1 and tells the other services to delete everything as part of the synching process?

Article also mentions the wish to tell cloud providers to search through data for you (without you needing to download everything) while withholding the decryption key from them (that's how I read it, anyway). I'm not sure this is possible either.
If you're losing that badly, you need a bigger handicap. A lot bigger.
Are there examples of products that were developed with RubyMotion?
Divine intervention: Google's Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet
The Netbook Legacy
All other things being equal, I suppose more money is better than less. But ultimately, happiness is a decision we make every day—or not.

For me, a mindfulness meditation practice has made this daily decision much easier. I need so little to be happy, and find so much everywhere to be happy about.

We get what we expect, so expect the good.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

There is another possibility too that is worth considering.

Sexuality may be, for humans, primarily social in the same way it is for Bonobos. Reproduction may simply be a functional necessity met as a side effect. If we see sex as a social interaction and the choice of a sex partner as a social matter, then the question is how various individuals fit within social structures or not.

There may be in-born aspects to how people relate to social factors and for some people these are quite evident (autistic people, for example, relate to social structures very different from non-autistic people). But even within the spectrum we might call "normal" (I don't like the idea of normal btw), there may be cognitive and even neurological reasons why some people may relate to specific social structures in specific ways.

However, beyond that, there are functionally necessary reasons why people must fit into social structures differently, and why at least some people must necessarily challenge and fall outside a social structure. Every taboo in society must have someone who challenges it. Every norm must have someone who falls outside it.

The reason is that without this process of perpetually challenging society, there are no individuals. You can't be an individual and blindly follow social norms. But beyond that perhaps on an evolutionary level, without people continually challenging, and redefining, social norms (a process which btw happens much faster in verbo-motor than literate societies), culture and society are static and dead and there is nothing to adapt it to the problems of the day.

So might be able to see various non-standard forms of sexuality (i.e. outside the social model of "normal" which in our society is defined by Barby and Ken, husband and wife, etc. i.e., monogamous and heterosexual), as necessary acts of rebellion which transform and breathe life into society. The only problem is how some Christians relate to their myths of rebellion but that's a different topic.

In this way we can perhaps past the argument as to whether gays are defective people who can't help it and simply can't conform to models of normality, or whether they are immoral people who choose to live outside accepted social norms.

I don't think that sexuality can be reduced to applied neuroscience just as chemistry can't be reduced to applied quantum physics.
You can always share emacs (or vim) under screen, tmux or that other thing Ubuntu uses on a throwaway EC2 instance.

I've been doing pair programming sessions on a Google Hangout sharing screens and I'm considering giving this setup another try.
Show HN: LetterSource - Sharing letters to legislators
https://lettersource.org/

I built this site to facilitate sharing of letters. I know it has a very rough and bootstrap-heavy look; I'm meeting up with a close friend of mine this week and he will help me clean it up. I'm kind-of excited about it and wanted to show it off and get some feedback on it while it's still in a pre-release stage (and maybe get a couple letters to seed it before releasing it to the public).

The basic premise is the ability to put a letter on the site (and in the public domain), and others can enter their address and it'll find legislators (federal only at the moment but users can add addresses and if they choose to share the address, it will also show up based on state or zip code). The site will then give you the option to download a formatted PDF with your address and their address already filled in.

For those not wanting to enter their address, the letter can be copied from the page, downloaded as text, html, or docx (docx is experimental and not perfect yet).

To geek-out a little:

* There are no cookies set on the site. The few administrative tasks and the chain-of-custody during letter creation is handled via randomized tokens and HMACs.

* I'm using redis heavily to cache pages (for 10 min) and the statistics. (Thanks antirez! I use it every chance I get. It's a powerful hammer.)

* It's built in PHP using the Kohana 3 framework along with many plugins including mustache and modified SecurImage.

* I'm currently using MySQL geospacial searching for zipcodes, but am planning on taking the Census shapefiles and importing them into PostGIS and just migrating to Postgres for everything. I haven't used Postgres yet, so it'll be a fun migration.

Any comments, questions, and/or critiques would be gladly accepted.
Having full-text search prevents you from having your own encryption, unless you want to hand over your key which makes it worthless.
Reminds me of Callrep.org
Some people argue that totality isn't enough, you really want a feasible (polytime) language.

http://www.di.unito.it/˜gaboardi/papers/BaillotGaboardiMogbi...

;-)
What stops you from just taking a week of unpaid time off?
The difference between Datomic and RDBMS isn't JUST a timestamp FYI. In fact I'd expect/hope this blog post is a just a prelude to Datomic's transactional model which is the real differentiator.
awesome article

some of my best friends come from India. it's an interesting place.
Of all the mobile electronics I've ever had, I remember my N770 the most fondly and wistfully. next to my then modern HTC Apache Windows Mobile device, it was like an artifact from the future. I coded up several great apps for it in python including a personal finances ledger and a price checker using the Amazon API. The thing was amazing. Even though it has since died and I've moved on to Android, I miss it.
Niat Puasa Ramadhan dan Doa Berbuka Puasa
If you're 17 and already a decent programmer, my best advice to you is to have some fun and exercise. Seriously you'll undoubtablely be a great programmer if you keep at it. But you might have regrets about how you spent your adolescence only programming. Get out, go to the gym, and learn to talk to different people. With the advantages you have of having your knowledge so young, it's best to focus on how you can compliment that to become a great, well-rounded person and also a great programmer.
Besides the point others have made that many Indians don't think like this anymore, I just want to point out that it is possible to believe in karmic destiny and not use that as an excuse to not help people.
The 'therefore' part of your observation doesn't necessarily follow from the premise and is more of an excuse used by people to justify behavior.
Machine.js: Make behaviour trees in JavaScript
That's if you like using interface builder. I personally dislike it and prefer to lay things out programmatically, but this probably has to do with the fact that I came to iOS development from the web development world.
As if to do almost the exact opposite of backing up my point, the PPC opcode I was thinking of is in fact `rlwimi' - Rotate Left Word Immediate then Mask Insert. I was thinking more like, Rotate Left and Insert Mask Word. Oh well.

So maybe longer opcodes would help, but I'd have got it wrong in either event - and I'd still need to have double checked the docs, to remind myself, again, just what the hell it does exactly.
Risky, error-prone and not correct? If you're going to throw out that kind of slander, you ought to back it up or it's just FUD. People used to say the same thing about Cocoa's "black magic" like the responder chain, undo support and Interface Builder. I didn't buy it from them then, and I don't buy this now.
Revision Control and Unit Tests Considered Harmful
Most people want to get the promotions and the money, but I think it's not only to buy the materialistic stuff they want. For many white-collar workers it's about the prestige, the status, the self-validation, and the respect these things tend to bring about. I think the thesis of this article applies to these "emotional" indulgences as well. I'd say if you respect yourself and have a sense of inner peace AND you acknowledge that you don't NEED to go from $75,000 to $175,000 (though of course it'd be nice) it gives you a kind of freedom from the shackles of what goes on at many a workplace. You can develop your skills because you enjoy getting better, do good work because you like what you do, and often get a promotion and more money as a byproduct without having to focus on it. That's one of the good things about the programming field :)

With regard to the "giving", I wonder what theories there are about why many people feel good when giving things up to benefit others. Is it just a societal/cultural thing, influenced by religions?
You can use the types the same way--define your types and write type signatures for your functions before implementing them.

I've found this particularly useful when writing really confusing code (like a Prolog interpreter, for example). Coming up with the types on a function clarifies what it has to do and shrinks the space of possible solutions significantly.

Types are a symbolic way to reason about code. Using types, you can get additional insight into how your function can be written just by following some simple rules. A good example of this is realizing that a function you're working on is actually a specific version of a more general function--you can see this if the type signatures look similar. This lets you reuse very high-level, generic code easily.

Going back to the Prolog example, I was having some trouble figuring out how the resolution algorithm should work. Then I realized that the sub-part I was having problems with was just special type of fold. This helped me get a very concise version of the function by reusing an existing library function.

So types can provide exactly the same sort of benefits as TDD.
What current projects of yours have gained traction and what problems do you really want to solve?
Lets forget the standard problems with measuring happiness and comparing it between different populations. There are issues there, but lets pretend like thats an accepted, valid practice that distills real truth. We're also going to pretend that people are completely honest when they fill these surveys out. What about some of these examples they use?

The chocolate example: The conclusion completely ignores the utility of having had chocolate on each day before the end of the week. If the result, that the marginal utility of a piece of chocolate a week later was less for people who had a lot of chocolate in between, surprised you, you've forgotten what marginal utility is. Do I need to really mention what's wrong with this comparison? Do people only enjoy chocolate on the weekend?

The children with goldfish: Imagine you earned a salary in NY strip steak as part of an experiment. Would you consider that experiment useful in drawing conclusions about money and utility or happiness?

The money in an envelope example: I'm not going to say anything about this, because I said in my intro that I'm going to ignore self-reporting bias caused by confronting someone about whether they acted ethically or not. (hint: if someone trusts you to do something and you don't do it, you may be less happy than someone who did do it--especially it is consistent with social expectations).

I don't mean to dispute the point the article is making, but honestly, after seeing the substance, I'm less inclined to believe it than I was beforehand.
The Curse of Bullshit
Here is that scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYAoq3cFY9U
(Skip to 2:20).
There's no way to prove that you proved the right thing, unfortunately. And, of course, your proof may not be correct. (Proof checkers can help, and I would have confidence in the correctness of a type-check as proof.)

Only having tests is "fine" for most circumstances because, unfortunately, proofs are intractable for most systems. During a software engineering talk I recently attended, an interview candidate stated that the largest proved-correct code base is on the order of 10,000 lines of code. Most people don't have the resources to do even that.

But, philosophically, I always want tests for the same reason that I run experiments: I want empirical evidence, not just reasoning. Empirical evidence increases my confidence that we have accounted for what we think we have.
Go is worse in this respect than chess.

In chess, in principle, you can sit down and think through every possible combination in a simple position and figure out tactical traps. After doing this a few times you learn what sort of things to look for.

In go, even for simple problems, there are too many possibilities to think through all possibilities. Until you can start to recognize key points, nobody can even explain to you how to think about problems.
As someone reading this post while working from home on my sunny balcony at 10:30 am and still in PJs, the freedom is worth at least $25k per year.
I've been hoping Microsoft would do this for years. I always assumed it would never happen, because... Well, I don't know. Why do companies where all of the senior people have read "The Innovator's Dilemma" still suck? Whatever the reason is for that.

In any case, I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Hi everyone. I'm Mary and I am making Isla. It's exciting to see the language posted to HN, and great to see so much discussion.

I agree with the people who say that a programming language that apes natural language can be frustrating. Inevitably, it cannot support even a fraction of the constructions that a human brain can parse. What made me try a natural language approach is the following (contentious) ideas:

* Children find it hard to type punctuation. Natural language can be parsed without punctuation.

* Someone new to programming probably knows nothing of conditionals, loops, logical operators and functions. So, a language that codifies these concepts as jargon in the form of keywords is going to be alien.

* If you ruthlessly constrain the features of a natural language-like programming language, it's possible that you can keep the advantage of human readability and dodge the disadvantage of the "uncanny valley", as `antihero` succinctly put it. In Isla, the only expressions are instantiations, assignments (with support for objects), `if this then that` style rules (maybe), and invocation of built in functions.

* The joy of programming is in building something. To get children interested in programming, the language they use needs an application. Children love telling stories, so why not make the application a story-telling environment? This gels nicely with the sparse feature set of the language: writing a story is mostly a matter of data definition.

This is the first programming language I have ever made. All these ideas are theories. Isla is just my first shot in the dark.
IOS 6: How will Smart App Banners work?
Learning Ruby:

* http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/

* http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/book/

* http://rubykoans.com/

* http://rubymonk.com/

Ruby on Rails Links:

* http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

* http://ubuntuone.com/0Au9WBjMGEoR4nDf6G0P7F

* https://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk
Yes, that would help. There are other things that would also help. Just now I'm in a holding pattern on learning Go. When I come back to it I'll go over basics again, play on small boards, and play more real time games. Anything else you'd recommend for me?
New Delays at RIM to Be Questioned by Shareholders
A very simple formula worked for me: a full LinkedIn profile and a technical blog. I've found that many people land on my LinkedIn profile, then some continue to my website where they can get an idea for my skill level by looking at some blog entries. Also, the clients that come via that channel are usually high quality clients. In general, they are dev shops with too much work to handle in-house, so they're looking for an extra hand. Since they're technical people, their projects are clearly stated and expectations are realistic.