skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I chose spaces over tabs long before I started writing Python. The issues with tabs are:

(1) Some editors will autoconvert them to spaces. Every time you switch editors, switch IDE's, edit your code on a different computer, or let someone else work on it, you have to remember to make sure your tabs are still there.

(2) With tabs, your code will look different for different people. I often line up parts of adjacent lines that are symmetric, and different tab widths will interfere with this. Ditto ASCII art in comments.

(3) It's hard to use tabs consistently because tabs and spaces are visually identical in most editors. (This is less of a problem in Python than other languages, because inconsistent tabs/spaces in your indentation are often caught quickly because they cause syntax errors.)

(4) My mathematical mind admires systems that are designed around simple and elegant ideas. A character display embodies the following two such ideas:

(a) Each location on the screen contains exactly one character.

(b) There is a one-to-one mapping between the pixel contents of an 8x8 box (or however big your font is, assuming all sane people use monospace fonts for coding) and an ASCII character. (Don't get me started on Unicode. I don't understand it, don't use it, and it haven't had it do anything for me but cause bizarre problems [1].)

Tabs break both of these properties. This causes cognitive dissonance and offends my sense of aesthetics.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4369323
FTA: "Try not to make the column too wide on desktop or it will be too hard to read because your eyes have to travel too far horizontally."

Personally I found this page incredibly annoying to read. I have to scan down with my eyes constantly due to the crazy font size, the large spacing between lines, and the limited width.

I actually feel my eyes moving, processing every word as a result of the large size limiting my ability to process the content. The outcome is mental breaks between reading words which destroys the fluidity of the content.

In short: terrible typography in my opinion. Granted its a single opinion and I may be an outlier but between the flashing gifs and the typesetting I would never have read all the way through this unless I had the intention of commenting about it's poorness.
My blog (http://rmenez.es) uses a variant of Syte (https://github.com/rigoneri/syte) hosted on Heroku. It looks great and uses Tumblr as a CMS. I highly recommend it.
Someday through historical echo transcription (YC14 perhaps), the real transcript will emerge...

Me: Hi Steve, remember how I asked all the managers to me with their direct reports 1-on-1 at least once every six months.

Steve: No, when was that?

Me: Never mind. I heard that Tim didn't do that.

Steve: Do what?

Me: Meet with his direct reports. 1-on-1.

Steve: Oh yeah. Reminds me, great Celtics game last night, huh?

Me: I tivo'd it and caught the last 5 minutes live. Saves a shitload of time wasted on commercials. Cable is gonna die a painful death. What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Please tell Tim to follow up or I will be pissed.

Steve: Sure you don't want to tell him yourself? He never listens to me.

Me: OK, maybe tomorrow. Remind me in 24 hours.
Composability in Haskell arises from abstraction made possible by a rich type system and simple semantics. IMHO and from my experience with dynamic languages, any syntactic solution to Composability will be a dead end, i.e. will not beget any other useful abstractions.
"that the myth of the necessity of nuclear power in Japan is just that. A myth"

This is just wrong. Japan is importing natural gas at prices x2-x5 higher than before. Causing Japans Trade balance (positive for nearly 30 years) to swing negative which is going to cause un-known and negative consequences for economy if this continues.

Energy both in availability and price is the economic engine that drives developed nations... we just replaced our Toyota to a expensive but nice BMW - somethings going to give.
Are you sure?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Flammability, to me, indicates that it may not be a wise idea to drop the stuff in the acid inside your stomach, even if it is only, say, a gram a day.
Comments like these make me wish I had the Karma to down vote. Like others have said, the guy was a genius, maybe one day we'll catch up.
Animal rights extremists have set many fires in England. There are several reasons why no-one so far has died:

1) We have excellent fire response services

2) We have strict fire safety codes for buildings - those shops should have had working sprinkler systems for example (and setting off the sprinklers was the stated aim - water damage would have caused just as much financial damage)

3) Timing the devices to go off at night when there would be minimal people working

4) The aim is not to kill people, but to cause financial loss. ALF have been successful at that.

There are other reasons why few people have been physically harmed by animal rights extremists - most extremists are "non violent" (where violence applies to people, but not property).

The wikipedia article for the ALF is reasonably complete.
The Indian biometric project is not unique in its aims nor scope to uniquely identify its population, simply the technology used to generate an ID.

In the U.S. we have SSNs (social security numbers) and driver's licences. India is rolling out a 21st century answer to the problem of uniquely identifying its population with technology to minimise the probability of false, duplicate, or un-recoverable identities being created.

The technology gives the Indian government the ability to "track" its citizens no further than the American government can "track" hers through their SSN-linked bank accounts, cell phones, and government office activity. In a nut shell, the technology hashes an individual's iris and fingerprints into an ID, allowing for the ID to be easily verified in a de-centralised manner. In contrast, verifying a U.S. ID requires patching in to a centralised database.

Can an iris scan and fingerprint be faked? Of course. But I'm not sure who's arguing for the security of U.S. identity cards given that a stroll through Greenwich Village will afford me multiple solicitations for fake IDs.

Ignore even the problems of having a democracy where you don't know who your citizens are nor if nor how many times they've voted and think about how difficult it would be for an individual with no verifiable identity to enter into a long-term contract. Would you give him a mortgage? Or a loan to plant his fields? Knowing well that if he doesn't feel like paying you back he can change the name he goes by and you won't know the wiser? On the other side, if you're a government official who knows nobody knows how many people are in your district, wouldn't you feel less comfortable embezzling funds from intended recipients if they had a way of proving they never received their handout?
> If your government and industry had failed you like that would you trust them to continue with nuclear power without fixing the underlying problems?

And yet, the hottest spots seem to be healthier places to live than Denver... Is that a really big problem?
I think you just did it pretty well.
When I visit that page I see almost nothing but file download links.
"Robust" is spin. "Restrictive" is neutral and factual.
Does Germany hold runoff elections? It looks like Merkel won in 2009 with only 34% of the vote. If they use the same system that the US does, that is probably why their elections only choose between the main two parties.
Actually, it's already available in Moscow airports: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14514816
good.. if they start planning now.. we, indians would get these at the end of this decade...
The title of the story - specifically the liberal use of "hack" - irritated me greatly, because it made the story sound bigger than what it is. Whoever wrote the story please reserve the word "hack" for true breakthroughs in future.
What I find annoying about infinite scroll:

Sites with a footer at the bottom of the web page that populate new items so fast that as you're scrolling it's impossible to click on the footer items. Facebook, I'm talking about you.
The problem is that right now implementors are all building different browsers that are attempting to provide a single consistent implementation of features as read off a spec document. A daunting, unenviable task to be sure.

Perhaps the solution is in frameworks or abstractions but that is also troubling. Who knows, it's still the best we've got right now, and that's going to have to be good enough for me.
You can say you've learned a language when you've worked with it enough that you're no longer confident that you know the language very well.
a man never says Maybe

unless he's absolutely sure that his mates aren't around.

Also, do you only know three people?
He never said it (working 12~16 hours) was expected of his employees, but it is most probable that this is part of the startup culture "thing". I work for a big tech company, but being the second in command, I've worked with my boss to establish a culture that even though it has a lot of the startup usual hardcore-ness, is also full of benefits. Here I am, working on a Saturday at 6:30 pm... I've done pretty much a 66 hour work week this week. I've done so because I care enough about the company and our products to want (this here being the keyword) to finish a series of tasks (some of which are improvements I've myself tasked my person with, not bug tickets or feature requests) I deem needed for the continuous improvement of the software. I've also had weeks where I spent around 20 hours (2 days) helping out IT to solve some tricky architecture + linux challenges the company was having (my role as a application UX and frontend wizard, doesn't mean I'm not also the "I love to create algorithms for our backend" and "local linux mastermind" roles) - and then left on a trip to camp until the next week.

This time I took off was not discounted from my pay, frowned upon, or taken out of official vacation time. It was just the company telling me that they appreciate all the effort I put in and that they respect my decision making regarding how I spend my time on the company clock, be it working unpaid overtime, or taking a few days to decompress. For me that is the real good company startup culture. The company gives me the freedom to stay late and to leave early, gives me the tools I need to be productive and doesn't force me into preset managerial roles that don't really do anything to increase productivity or facilitate increased code throughput, and gives me the trust that I'm going to achieve what my responsibilities require however I see fit.

Am I a workaholic? Not a chance. I once worked almost 50 hours straight, not because I "want to work", but because I had a challenge I wanted to solve. I solved it and I went home to sleep and took a personal day (once again not unpaid or taken out of any "special time") after that. I'm not the usual geek slash programmer. I enjoy going to the gym and having one too many beers with my friends. I enjoy bar hopping and pickup up girls at clubs. I also enjoy coding, and if I weren't spending 4 to 6 extra hours at work writing code, I'd be doing it at home.
i got the RAM from crucial
Random question: Could the altitude of Denver contribute to its lower incidence rate of cancer? Your body does have to work a bit harder to live higher up. Just curious.
It's usually done in a more subtle, indirect way.
Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL
I've also seen wikis that just turn into gigantic repositories of stale data that just sit around while tribal knowledge is passed around by word of mouth. This seems to be the default state of the company wiki, really.
I am convinced that the nuclear power industry remains not only inextricably linked to nuclear WMD programs, but its expansion is in fact driven by the desire for the materials, technology and capability to develop nuclear weapons
> When people at parties ask me, "What do you do?", I no longer actually answer the question. Instead of saying that I am a computer programmer or that I work with computers, I say, "Oh, I work for [company name]". They still know what I really do (if they give it a little thought at least) but the reactions I get are noticeably better.

"How are you?", "Nice weather", and "What do you do?" are typically throw away interactions. Most people aren't expecting a conversation thread to fork at that point. However, if you want to inject a little energy/entropy into the conversation say something that reveals your own real interests

For example: "I am a programmer. Yeah, it's geeky but I like being able to craft stuff for a living - I'm very luck to be able to build something that other people can use - though sometimes it requires a sledgehammer to bang stuff into shape. However, what I really like doing is drawing caricatures. It's taken a while to get to the point where I can actually make it look like the person...in less than a day. How about you, what do you enjoy doing?"

> So what am I supposed to do?

Like dinner parties in France, the best conferences/meetings are the ones that have more than a minority of either sex represented.

If you really want to do something, you can't just write a blog post or a comment. Organize some sort of hacker/meetup and actively reach out to the minority population (this can involve women, urban youth, heck - even senior citizens) - do it and then write about it. Or you can write about it to challenge people (before doing it), as this person has (below).

> Which is where this conference thing gets interesting. Rather than throw up your hands and say it’s the nature of the business, you can embrace this challenge. You can read about what other people have done in this realm, and you can apply your considerable problem-solving skills to come up with new solutions that will benefit us all.

http://www.dogsandshoes.com/2012/06/getting-women-and-other-...
Yeah. I am a huge fan of Ben. He has done brilliant insightful post after brilliant insightful such post. And there is undoubtedly an important point being made. But the way the story is told is incredibly patronizing. I hope this was simply rhetorical artifice rather than a blow by blow account of the meeting.
I'm still a fan. Too much good stuff. But a little disappointed by the style tho not the substance.
Natural gas is a hydrogen based fuel.
Actually what really blew me away was how much of the app was working and ready to go. Most people who pitch this idea end up not doing much more than some initial planning.

Apoorva had the iPhone app written, tens of thousands of items already in the database, and working with delivery people he had already hired. While the beer was nice, it really hammered home how much he had already done.
Swiftype (YC W12) is hiring full-stack engineers to build better search software
Most websites have terrible site search. Founded by the engineers who built Scribd’s search, Swiftype (http://swiftype.com) is fixing that by offering a dead-simple modern search for sites ranging from your sister’s Tumblr to Alexa Top 100 behemoths. Swiftype’s usage is growing quickly, so we need to expand our team.

What we have:

An API and dashboard built with Rails 3, Rails Metal, MongoDB, Redis and Lucene

A high performance crawler capable of spidering millions of pages per hour

An easy-to-install search box with modern features like autocomplete

Search analytics and results re-ordering

An intelligent page-content analysis system for parsing websites automatically

Client libraries for Ruby, Python, PHP and jQuery

Horizontally scalable Infrastructure

A lot of happy customers

What we need to do:

Completely automate provisioning for our search clusters

Scale our backend from thousands of requests/second to millions

Bulletproof failover across multiple datacenters

Build payment processing for our API and integrate with platform partners like Heroku

Create API wrappers for more languages and plugins for popular CMSes and ecommerce platforms

Improve our crawler performance and concurrency (Will it be JRuby, Go, Scala, Clojure or
something else? -- you’ll help decide)

Write awesome documentation, tutorials and sample apps so integration is super simple

Sound interesting? We want to hear from you. We are a small team (all engineers) so we are looking for engineers who can contribute across the full stack from the crawler to the CSS and JavaScript.

As a small but well-funded company we can offer you a competitive salary and significant equity stake, health and dental benefits, and lunch as a team every day. The job is located in San Francisco. You must be local or willing to relocate (assistance provided).

To apply, email jobs@swiftype.com. Please include whatever info you believe is relevant: resume, GitHub profile, code samples, links to personal projects, etc.
Firing as a motivational tool to foster open communication. That is priceless. Key learning for me is to avoid working with people who think this is a good idea.
I can say that postgres made overblown claims for their products in the late 90's. They'd use FUD to scare people away from MySQL, but two times I had a "Dude Where's my Data" experience with PostgreSQL which sent me back to MySQL.

I was involved with one project with PostgresSQL that was successful around 2005. I did 5 "shootouts" of DBMS alternatives that considered PostgresSQL and other products for various projects and despite having some attractive features, PostgresSQL always lost out. For instance, in mysql I was able to create indexes that could handle Freebase text fields without any "impeadance mismatch and it wasn't clear how to do it with pgsql.
>I joined Hacker News around 5 years ago.
Your profile says account created 555 days ago.
I ignore temperature claims like that one. There are too many politically-motivated lies being pushed in the name of science.
I'm not sure (yet) how this site works, and especially how comments are (up/down)voted, but I noticed that this one (parent) is displayed in grey-ish font. Does that mean it was downvoted?

If so, I disagree with whoever did this. My opinion is exactly the same: you know a language when don't have to learn it while doing some useful work in it. And yes, it's the best time to move on or else you'll become bored quickly. And yes - whoever stops learning programming (with this language, that framework or other library) at some point ceases to be a developer (in my eyes) and there is a high chance that he never really was one.
probably worth noting that it's LNT, which implies No Safe Dose, that forms the basis for international radiation protection standards
These are great analogies: infinite scroll as a "slot machine". The Pinterest homepage is "like opening a can of digital Pringles".

But the comparison should also raise the question: are slot machines and Pringles (and everything like them) good for people?

Some of these UX patterns are thus a High Fructose Corn Syrup of design. Shovel them into any interface to make it seem more urgent, important, and novel... but it's a false sheen that's ultimately unhealthy for the audience.

I'm not just picking on Pinterest and its ilk. The kind of 'top stories' ranking used by HN is also an 'attention sugar' offender. The dynamic-but-decaying ranking creates an often-false sense of urgency; mixing unlike stories (including a trickle of duplicates and mislabeled material) in close and semirandom proximity heightens the sense of novelty. It makes reading even stories that are trivial, redundant or quickly superceded by corrections seem more important than it really is.

Perhaps we need to categorize interface patterns by a sort of 'attentional glycemic index', and limit intake of the worst variants.
That's a benefit of having nasty manufacturing sent overseas. Oh, but then jobs take a dip too. Now what's more important to us, the environment or our economy?
I don't think that's a problem.

As we've seen for years PostgreSQL users will quite happily and naturally remind everyone how much superior it is to MySQL (and every other database) at every opportunity.
the OP characterizes Twitter's imposing of developer unfriendly guidelines as anti-competitive, which it is not

I don't see how such characterization, accurate or not, mean that OP says the world is entitled to what Twitter builds.

As far as I know, all companies are commercially driven.

Firstly, I still don't see how does that tie to my post. I wasn't making an apology of the article. That said, OP did use a qualifier ("such"). I'd claim that there are less commercially driven companies, e.g. Canonical.

Twitter wields power because people like to use it.

People like to use Gmail too, but if they kick you out, you can still communicate with everyone there. Twitter wields power because it's a locked-in system.

But so does Facebook.

So?

That the author tried to "build a business on Twitter’s platform for the past 3 years" and then be upset by Twitter's change of heart suggests a little sour grapes on his part.

That's called an ad-hominem fallacy. The fact that he may be pissed does not make him wrong.

While Twitter is the market leader, it does not have a monopoly on "status updates". The last time I checked my Facebook feed, it was full of the same type of updates that Twitter provides, and Facebook is pretty popular. Google+ is also a well funded competitor to Twitter.

Again, I fail to see how is this related to my post.
BitWasp: an open-source marketplace based on Tor and Bitcoin
GitHub icons missing
I remember PG's essay about "relentlessly resourceful": after reading this dude's story, it's pretty much exactly that. It's still surprising that he got in late - but not as surprising. He demonstrated, in a visceral way, that he had the trait that PG has described as a top success factor for YC companies. Good for him!
Ask HN: Has anyone gotten to Y Combinator through here?
Has anyone been recruited to YCombinator through news.ycombinator.com? If not through YCombinator, how about via angels or incubators via this site?
Unless "inf" (the floating point special value) becomes a CSS literal, I'm not gonna use this one.
You might want to read up on:

http://ycombinator.com/apply.html
I am not a hammerer. Yet once when I saw PL/SQL on a candidate's resume, I did start asking some questions--not stuff like "explain PRAGMA WNDS" but "tell me a bit about how you've done xyz in PL/SQL" and promptly hit a blank look.

I think that it is reasonable to ask questions about what is on a resume.
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Womzel is a mobile gaming platform that lets users hide games, puzzles, and riddles around their city for others to play. Hide sound messages inside your favorite restaurant, Play a platformer on top of the Empire State building, make dreams a reality. www.womzel.com
Invite 2 Friends and guarantee Early Beta Access.
I agree global warming does imply warmer winters and summers. I'm not sure if you're addressing the article or what I wrote, but if you look at C02 emissions over a full year, I doubt the warmer winter would result in a reduction of total annual C02 production, because summers will now require more energy & C02 (to cool). I'm saying the title is misleading because just because a small reduction in the US' winter's C02 doesn't mean the planet is cooling (or global warming is reversing) ... especially if you factor in developing world emission growth, which I didn't mention before.
Since when are the two mutually exclusive ?
what other industry gets to benchmark social license against this tsunami? What other unacceptable risks should be weighed up against 15,000 deaths "to put it in perspective"? On the scale of badness, how many deaths does an industry need to be responsible for until its "a scale tipper"? This is a very poor way of weighing up the very real ongoing risks and hazards presented by the nuclear power industry.