skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You lost me for a minute there with parts of your comment until I realized you were thinking this was a different comment from months ago. But you got it for the most part. I was not suggesting they were not human. I was trying not to offend them if, in fact, they turned out not to be human (I was thinking alien... not bot... bots don't get offended). While formal language can be thought of as lofty these days when no one really speaks like that, it is also how people used to speak. It always cracks me up when I see movies set in that day and the people say the most absurd, inane things yet seem to do it so eloquently and with a smile. They make it seem so pleasant. I was going for old-timey pleasant... not current day lofty. True, pointing out a typo is largely useless, but it was necessary due to my previous point about lofty/pleasant language. True, I had no regret. Really, I was just trying to illustrate that rolling a turd in chocolate and nuts does not make it an Almond Roca.
Fab. That's helpful. And getting all of that detail right strikes me as the kind of thing that is best approached through incremental growth, so that you can polish cases in collaboration with clients. Which, as you said, this market is not well suited for.
I'm having a similar experience with my 8yo and his arduino. The coolest thing is to watch him google and struggle (and persevere) despite not being able to read all that well.

Its also bizarre to be with someone who can read and understand the word "instantiate" but is mystified by "pizza".
Right, libtool is the same - the people that wrote it weren't in a position to demand that all the UNIX-likes out there standardise their ld flags, so they routed around the problem instead.
It's interesting that they bothered to put up an 8ft fence but not line it with razor wire. Barring wire cutters, I doubt this guy would have gotten over.
The site looks great and I love the idea! One thing that I noticed about the landing page was that as I was trying to read your slides they transitioned to the next one too fast. A longer interval or less text might make it easier to digest.

Good luck!
Who is the "Longevity Party" co-founder and what does he want?
Github's CSS Styleguide
I've become interested in evolutionary psychology. Not at all expert, but when one considers the survivability of children in ancient (pre-historic) environments, seems logical that children increased the likelihood of survival by mimicking the adults they see; figuring out how to do the basics like feeding themselves, finding a safe place to sleep, taking cover during inclement weather, and generally assimilating adult behavior. The sooner they learned these skills, the better their chance of survival if they became separated from adults. Evolution selected for such behaviors.
That conclusion is a thought experiment, and I haven't dug up scientific evidence, so an anecdote: I once came home from work to find my 6 year old daughter in my closet. She had put on one of my shirts, a tie and my shoes. She was holding an old briefcase. When she saw me, she said, "daddy, let's go do some business!". I believe that kids have a genetically driven need to emulate their parents and that need is rooted in evolution and is much more profound than we realize. Regrettably, the modern parenting and schooling systems squelch that need.
Here's another anecdote: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/12070...
This resonates with me. I've inherited an application recently that uses autoconf. Makefile.am files generate Makefile.in, which become Makefiles, which actually do the build. Then there's autogen.sh, configure.ac and acinclude.m4. If I want to change something in the build process, I don't have a clue where to start.

The real kicker? It's a Python application, so there isn't much of a build process anyway. You can run it directly from source.
Yes. It was a hack.
Well, maybe they should.
As I recall, Orion-style craft scales up well. Ahh, the Wikipedia article says "physicist Ted Taylor showed that with the right designs for explosives, the amount of fissionables used on launch was close to constant for every size of Orion from 2,000 tons to 8,000,000 tons." The original design team worked on 4,000 and 10,000 ton vehicles and the "Super" was an 8 million ton interstellar vehicle.

The timing isn't so critical. It could handle a 10ms timing variation, and a misfire.

George Dyson's book, Project Orion, is well written. That being the son of Freeman Dyson, who worked on the project.
I'm nodding so hard my neck hurts.
I like the name. Can I add a few items to your taskup?
[ ] The Business Plan mentions a Grow Plan, but it's not on the pricing page.
[ ] I think it's a bit unfair to call the Unlimited Plan "Popular" when it's not available yet.
I also thought the same thing. A glass can be half full or half empty, depending on your attitude.
Programming's not politics. Fast Times with Steve Yegge
Lambasting libtool for providing a consistent experience across star-NIX is, imo, not the wisest move for a FreeBSDer.

Article: This is a horribly bad idea, already much criticized back in the 1980s when it appeared, as it allows source code to pretend to be portable behind the veneer of the configure script, rather than actually having the quality of portability to begin with. It is a travesty that the configure idea survived.

Good high-minded notions here. But configure, with it's standardized parameters for how to do stuff, is near irreplaceable at this point. Certainly a more stripped down version, one not built on M4, would be wise, but libtool/autoconf itself is used too broadly & with trepid familiarity by developers & upstream maintainers: in spite of so much of it being indeed old deprecated no longer useful cruft, the best we can hope for is duplicating a wide amount of the existing functionality in a cleaner manner.

But at what cost would reimplementation come? How many weird build targets would for months or years go unnoticedly broken?

The place where we escape these painful histories is where we leaving the old systems programming languages behind. Node's npm I'd call out as a shining beacon of sanity, enabled by the best most popular code distribution format ever conceived: source distribution, coupled with a well defined not-completely-totally-batshit algorithm for looking for said sources when a program runs & at runtimes goes off to find it's dependencies:
http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/modules.html#modules_all_t...
He's not talking about engines though, but at about some golden age in Unix's history when All was Right. Or at least that's part of what I got from it.

He also mentions 'one person having responsibility'. Does he mean a benevolent dictator? Linux and Python have that. They're imperfect in their own ways too.
It's a matter of perspectives. The article author's one is that of taste. The bazaar folks' (including web startup folks)is that of practicality. To illustrate using the same example from the piece - so what if a bunch of crypto code is copy / pasted? It's all out in the open - if anyone ever comes up with an actual problem with the code copy / paste, how hard can it be to fix it?

Matter of the fact is that the world doesn't have a critical mass of people with agreeing tastes and fundamentals to get them to come together and build something moderately complex.

What we do have however is a world full of reasonable people who just want to build something and make it work so they can solve some problem of theirs. There are also people who will happily reuse what the folks before them built - improving it in the process.

If we were to impose a high barrier to entry for people to code and design systems in absolute best possible way - we are effectively saying only a few will build software for the whole world. That'd be a net loss IMHO.

The point about bad design is worth arguing when software doesn't do what you want it to do, i.e. fails practice. But that is mitigated by the fact that individual stall in the bazaar does enforce some design, some testing, some sort of sanity to ensure it at least works most of the times.

Is it a sad situation - yes, we would be much better off with every programmer being perfect. But so long as that is impractical the bazaar alternative works in creating tons of fixable, mostly usable, continuously improved software - for which I can hardly call it a lost cause.
Morphable Devices: Programmable Matter
"Besides if the author feels that he can maintain his codebase this way then I don't see any problem in it."

Exactly.
these men have invented time travel
>I don't know where on earth he got "By definition an idiom is something you remove from good clean writing," which is obviously not true

Maybe from all those classic books on writing, like the "Chicago Manual of Style", "On Writing Well" and "The Elements of Style", which all agree on the point.

Where you got this bizarro impression that idioms are NOT to be avoided in writing? Idioms are cliches, and they needlessly obfuscate a text.
One pretty cool use of this is the URL shortening service TinyArrows.

http://tinyarro.ws
You can limit rewards if you like (usually used for "early bird" discounts).
However, I doubt Kickstarter would approve, as it's supposed to be for creative projects only.
Nice app - good luck brother
Except that evolution did put a man on the moon...unless you are one of those who don't believe humans are the result of 3 billion years of evolution?

What you have to consider is that individual cells evolved, until they created a whole greater than themselves. No individual cell was in control of that first step Armstrong took onto the moon. Likewise, what we end up creating from so much "bazaar" development will almost certainly accomplish something amazing...

...without any of us being able to take credit for it.
"Who cares if Samsung" made a pale and horrid replica of what "Apple" is buying screens from them for.

Apple is probably one of Samsung's biggest clients.

I think patents shouldn't exists but... there's no point in making a copy of something else if you can't improve it... and Samsung couldn't even make the device decent.
Just have to market it as a "military-grade intrusion detection system" or something.
> Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon.

I think we can see abundant proof evolution can go a long way towards that specific goal.

The reason your work machine, running BSD, works the way it does (and self-assembles that way) is because each part of its software environment is independent, designed for different goals and constraints and it just happens to work together well enough you can work with it. It would be easy to standardize Unixes, but then you wouldn't be able to compile M4 for Windows or use one of the 26 FORTRAN compilers absent from your system. Also, what happens when you realize your design led you to a dead end? Evolution usually has plans B to Z built in. It's really difficult to make something evolve into a corner.

Having plans B to Z built-in has an impact on the overall elegance and purity of the design.
Maemo was apt-based as well.
I would pay extra to fly at the no-security airport. I miss the days when you could walk right out to the gate with your friends who are leaving until it's time for them to board the plane. When you would be there at the gate when your grandparents or grandkids arrive so they can see you the minute they get off the plane and you can help them with their carry-on bags.

Oh, and getting at the airport a half hour before the flight leaves, but still making the flight. I miss that the most. :-)
Why Numbering Should Start At Zero
I have the second edition. I counted the other day and found that I have 10 books on Olympic weightlifting and another 8 books on related topics.
Why should I as a FreeBSD person not be allowed to lambast the worst hack-on-hack-on-hack-on-hack I have to suffer ?

And trust me, libtool is replaceable, all it takes an agreement about a compiler and loader flag for producing shared libraries and you suddenly don't need it at all.
its high tech shoplifting, the tech is fine but the morality of the act makes me wonder when he needs to make hard choices professionally will he revert to type and get over or do the right thing. It is odd that someone who is going into an integrity based profession thinks it is cool to brag about being a thief.

I do not have any problems with anyone scanning their books for personel use and its legal, but this was not.
Ah yes, the age-old static typing vs duck typing argument.

Sure, in theory static typing can catch bugs. But doing it like Java does it is a lot of work per real bug actually caught.
Windows Group Policy
I remember it well; in NL we used to have those radio programs but also plastic 'flex' records you would put on your record player connected to your computer. You would be able to run the Basicode on any supported computer which gave you the ability to share between C64 and MSX for instance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE.
Imagining a future without traditional marketing
App looks slick. How about multistep tasks?

That's the one thing that keeps me with Toodledo.com
Rejection.  Done right this time.
> Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote.

Because you claim he's attacking open source software, and you said that maybe he thinks MS is the standard bearer of his cause.

The (easy to find) facts are that he has committed a lot of code to open source and has been involved in freeBSD for many years. These are not small trivial bits of code used by a few people or for insignificant reasons. Crypt and varnish are bits of code getting billions of uses.
I tell people all the time.. "Do you remember when you could bullshit anyone." Now they just type your BS into their smart phone.
link can be a single String? I can see here new "info = new WebInfo(title, url, new String[]{link1, link2,...});" that it can't. This is the kind of thing you get with a typed object. Also, instead of Strings for title, url, etc you could use tiny types. Yes, it is a lot more verbose, but it comes with a advantage (compile time erros over runtime erors). TinyType also documents what you should pass for the constructor. If you need some preparation to get a url (I don't know, like, finding it on some txt), typing would lead you to do it.
Dead simple arduino input devices
Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/

You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain.

I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?

This is also why I love man pages.

Edit: Just in case anyone is not aware check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

I was asking if anyone knew of the easiest way and I see some options below. Thanks, I'll look into those.
Heck you don't even need to go that far. Just look up the headers to disney.com, they use Apache!!
"If you're relating to these pictures"

... what pictures?
I don't think the article rigorously defends its position. Just because a company innovates after being copied does not mean it is innovating because it was copied. The article doesn't give one example of a situation where a company was motivated by being copied (or even a solid reason why they would be motivated by that).

I'll explain the correlation I see: products that are bound to be very profitable are bound to be copied, so of course a company like Apple will develop something like the iphone despite potential copycats.
Had a quick run through over lunch - looks really promising :)

Going to use it to rapid prototype an app this week - just one thing, any prospect of coffeescript in the pipeline?
Intern Perspective: Exploring Facebook Likes
A new sliding keyboard concept
Full disclosure - I run Reference Tree (http://reference-tree.com) we rent textbooks by chapter from Publishers including those mentioned in the post focussed on the UK higher education market.

Many professors in the UK resist attempts for custom editions and for single access to textbooks, indeed there are those who even go so far as to _avoid_ textbooks pushed in this way - preferring academic relevance over expense account dinners.

I am surprised, in fact very surprised that a university would allow such a connection between a book and a course. it goes against principles of higher education and education in general. What happens if you take the course but can not afford the text (and did not have the patience and drive shown by Luke?) How lacking in belief in their own capabilities to teach and research must an academic be if they must think of these types of activities to shore up their own income?

Many UK academics we have spoken to would rather use the best content for their course from a variety of sources than either custom editions from a single publisher or a single textbook.

Indeed work such as those by Flat World Knowledge and Bookboon.com on a market level as beginning to chip away at this market dominance, however you will still have unscrupulous professors. The growth of Flat World Knowledge in terms of adoptions, shows that there is a clear market out there for accessible alternatives to mainstream textbooks.
Architects don't build cathedrals anymore, either. Neither do most software architects. Yet, look what they have built: an incredibly diverse collection of structures of all shapes and sizes, all working together to form an imperfect yet efficient system. Surely its success is due in part to its flexibility and imperfection, and the fact that they are no longer over-engineered and inflexible behemoths made from stone.

If you try too hard to design a rigid structure around anything, it can come back and bite you in the ass. Part of the reason why this seemingly disorganized and haphazard collection of buildings makes a working and thriving metropolis is because of its diversity and resilience to change and progress. If you attempt to over-engineer something of such complexity, you might just end up with Pyongyang instead of New York. Instead, we have a competing ecosystem of libraries and options with the good ones theoretically rising to the top. Better communities and communication of these values make this process work even better, just as in the greater economy. For all its complexity, this process works surprisingly well.

For all the explaining Kamp did in this article, the one thing he failed to account for was the resounding success of the current model. He did use a surprisingly apt metaphor, however. Cathedrals are no more; their old place as the center of society had to be explained by a series of myths and lies that placed ideals above reality. The thriving Bazaar easily replaced them at the center of any thriving modern city, based on the simple truth that the dynamic edge of reality was ever-changing, and that quality based on that reality would indeed be more successful.

Could it be better? Of course. But it is reality and truth that will move us forward—not mythology. Good riddance to cathedrals.
32 cores of fast ARM in half-depth 1U case
you can't expire that session key either, so it is as good as sending a password

which is why I assume they didn't want to update the key either, since it would invalidate every session
Hi, the tool is aimed primarily at:

- developer-focused marketers (What are developers interested in, so we can build better products for them?)

- developer evangelists/advocates (Are developers adapting the tools we're evangelising about?)

- IT industry analysts (What are the industry trends? What will be popular next year?)

And from the discussions with those groups, I know they would be willing to pay for this kind of tool.
Obviously, my goal is to build a critical mass of users and customers. And the dilemma is whether leave it a SaaS tool and earn from subscription or open it up for everyone and make profit in some other way...
Responded over here: http://kerr.io/rejection-done-right/

I think you grew up sheltered and have expectations that are not in line with reality.
Evolution put a man on the moon already in 1969.

Maybe you will not accept this statements for similar reasons like the ones driving your essay.
Phish!
This last year I have made a conscious effort that whenever I use the word 'just' in communicating at work I stop. It has taken some time and introspection but for me personally when I prefface a statement with "... just do.." it follows with a statement I have put about 10 seconds of thought into and isn't really valuable.

I now listen for the word 'just' when other people are pitching ideas, or forming repsonses and tend to ignore what is said next as I suspect they too have put little thought into the statement they are about to make.

I'm not sure this is a great general case recomendation, but it has helped me in my parsing language for possible stupidity.
Well, geom, ZFS and dtrace are generally features that people like a lot. Also, the BSDs are quite lightweight, which makes them nice for such hardware.

Linux has competing technologies such as btrfs and SystemTap, but they may not be as mature.
I used to work for an Amazon merchant doing roughly $2 million /year in sales-- not big, but big enough that this was not a side business.

In our case, FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) was useful for a few things, but increased profit was not one of them.

On the contrary, we used FBA to sell 'hot' items quickly, which in turn led to boosts of higher customer feedback for our merchant account.

Ultimately though, the increased traffic you might get with your FBA items is seriously offset by the increased competition you will get from other merchants and even Amazon itself. And After Amazon takes the cut for doing the fulfillment, you are left with pennies per sale in profit if you are lucky enough to get the volume sales.

Another unexpected negative aspect of using FBA is that occasionally Amazon fulfillment centers claim that there is "something wrong" with your goods or they are "damaged in shipment" and they refuse to store them or ship them. You have to eat the cost in these cases.

I think FBA can be useful if you are a merchant with a specific product line that won't experience direct competition, or if you are a small merchant trying to build some traction.

On a side note, I think FBA is a brilliant win-win strategy for Amazon: they get paid for storing stuff whether it sells or not, and they get merchants to test out product lines at ZERO cost to themselves.
Money — Ya just can’t Win for Losing — Sheesh | Wealth Building Network
Thanks for this. Will definitely fix this.
> To illustrate using the same example from the piece - so what if a bunch of crypto code is copy / pasted? It's all out in the open - if anyone ever comes up with an actual problem with the code copy / paste, how hard can it be to fix it?

Crypto is a bad example to use. Crypto is hard. I don't want random people writing their own crypto, I want them to carefully use other crypto packages, after having spent a long time reading the documentation.

Copy pasting is better than creating their own from new, but still leaves them potentially open to weird edge cases, but now with a false sense of security because they copy pasted.
I can definitely agree with this article, especially since it echos my thoughts about work at 24 years old. The only unfortunate side of the story comes from the people in my age group who will not step up and do the work that comes with the additional freedom. I have seen those kids, and I despise them. I have also seen the young men and women who put forth the effort, and I am hopeful for the future.
For those who value their time just a bit, I would suggest sites like bookrenter.com where you rent the book instead of buying. It is much cheaper for the basic classes (e.g common CS classes like Data Structures) but I've noticed that for my more advanced graduate classes it's cheaper to buy used off Amazon.