skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I could talk about social justice and basic fairness, but the tone of your question implies that you don't see it that way. So instead, let's look at the question from a coldly calculating point of view.

Let's say I have a open source project, and it's got 100 contributors (or community members, users, whatever -- the it's all the same). If my project follows today's averages, that group will be on the order of 98 men and 2 women. Let's say we work to increase our diversity such that now 50% of our community are women. How big is the community now?

That's right -- 200 people. It's not like adding 50% women removes 50% men... if we increase the number of women in our community, we increase the number of people. Now I've got twice as many contributors, twice as many users, twice as much activity, etc. Open source projects live and die on the strength of their communities. Increasing diversity is often actually the easiest way to increase membership, full stop.

[Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. But the point is that even if you don't give a shit about those sorts of ideals, there are still coldly calculating economy-of-scale arguments for why diversity is important.]
Numbered badges for your plain text todo lists
I've said many times before that I will never buy another non-ad-supported Kindle as long as they're available. While the price going down is nice (not that it's much), what's more important to me is that the ads are actually good! I've gotten quite a few deals on books (e.g. $0.99 book deals not available to non-ad Kindle owners), probably close to $20 off on Amazon MP3, and quite a few other things I'm forgetting. They're not remotely obtrusive and they add value for me; I really can't see any downside whatsoever.
Amazon Is Sucking The Profit Out Of iPads - iPhones Next?
Makes sense. If your language isn't Arabic, you may be unable to, for instance, write the website address down.
This pretty much applies for any endeavor ; not just learning to code. Thanks for the post.

2 Biggest mistakes when learning to [TASK X]

Mistake #1: I spent too much time learning things that I didn’t actually need.

Mistake #2: I didn’t start [TASK X] right away.
Pandora's iPhone app is a major outlet for iAd.

I wonder why the reporters chose to include that, especially as a lone sentence at the end of the article. Surely they understand that Apple stands to gain far more in revenue from a Pandora-like service than they would lose from showing fewer iAd impressions due to a decline in Pandor use. Right?
I think that's not strictly true, what about الخ meaning الى اّخره (i.e. to the end of it, meaning "etc".). In some books ح can mean حديث. But generally it is very rare.
I personally think this thread is full of great discussion. There is certainly a certain character of pedantry on Hacker News, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of feedback. Compared to a lot of other forums, Hacker News gives a lot of good feedback, and the stories on it have been very helpful to me.

Just my take. I personally don't care about karma on this thing. However, I must admit that I cared a little more when it was displayed! Public reputations seem to do wonders for keeping people well-behaved.
I disagree (at least that this is universal). If you start with just fundamentals but no specific language, you can't whip up anything to play with. The amount I was able to learn easily without doing anything was quite low, so I'd say start with a language with a responsive interactive shell so that you can quickly see what things do for yourself, and (crucially) see what happens when you make small changes to whatever examples you might be looking at.

But there's a bit of this I agree with: don't get focused on just one language. Once you can get basic stuff done in one language, it's worth learning how to do stuff in a different language. For me, the second language was almost as hard as the first, but after that it got a lot easier.

(Which is not to say that I don't think fundamentals are important: I'd suggest eventually hitting the core algorithms, data structures, computer architecture stuff—even if it doesn't seem immediately relevant—as well as playing around with more out-there stuff (Prolog was always a favorite of mine). But I don't think all that's going to be interesting at first to someone who's just getting started out of a practical, "I want to build something", not a "I want to learn all of this!", motivation.)
Pragmatic Concurrency With Ruby
Man, yeah, that shouldn't happen :)

I've fixed the bug and updated the download. It would occur when you created a new app group and then changed the app group name. Thanks again for your detailed feedback, it helped me fix this bug.
That's not what I said. Generating a predictable distribution by hashing is old hat.

What's awesome is you can then make inferences about the original data from those hashes -- something that good hash functions are supposed to be resistant to, in isolation.
I would talk a more organic approach. Jump right in and when you come upon some bigger subject matter (sorting algorithms for instance), take a break and go study the subject a bit..
This is the next-gen of AR!
What's peculiar is that "a house" or "a hose" is given to be correct, but "a honour" or "a hour" is not.

It's probably that words with a more French origin, where the "h" is subdued, require "an" where the harder "h" from more Germanic words does not.
thats why cs courses has projects, to test the theories in to practice, the good thing about fundamentals is that it teaches you that the language its not an end for it self instead its just a tool to express yourself
> In perl there is YaML ...

YAML is not just limited for use in Perl, nor is it as closely related to Perl as JSON is to Javascript. One of its creators, Ingy döt Net, was (and still is) an active member of the Perl community, so Perl had excellent support for YAML from the very beginning.

From http://www.yaml.org/about.html:

The founding members of YAML are Ingy döt Net (author of the Perl module Data::Denter), Clark Evans, and Oren Ben-Kiki. YAML emerged from the union of two efforts. The first was Ingy döt Net's need for a serialization format for Inline, this resulted in his Data::Denter module. The second, was the joint work of Oren Ben-Kiki Clark Evans on simplifying XML within the sml-dev group. YAML was first publicized with a <?xmlhack?> article on 12 May 2001. Oren and Clark's vision for YAML was very similar to Ingy's Data::Denter, and vice versa, thus a few days later they teamed up and YAML was born.
I wonder if Facebook gets subsidies... It's an Orwellian paradise.

And let's not forget Google too - they have Picasa, Google+, Android face unlocking...
"Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments"

Except this, I agree with most of your comment. Most of the time I just up vote a good comment with out my eyes sliding to the poster's name (it provides me no meaningful information in most scenarios). Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to. It's possible that they are able to put their thoughts into comments better than others. Since most of the names don't trigger a face to most people I don't see how this could be due to bias.
I'm glad I read this: I pre-ordered the ad version yesterday unawares, and just cancelled my order and re-ordered with the extra no-ad tax. My ship date slipped by 10 days sadly.
As a whippersnapper who only signed up 1141 days ago, I believe the quality of the best commentary is still as good, though the bottom has gotten bigger and worse.

So far, good filtering that bubbles the best comments to the top is working at keeping the discussion readable. I find I no longer tend to bother following the comments all the way to the bottom, since that's where all the crap accumulates.
You should have said that with "Free style templates" what you really mean is a BPEL.

The first time I've seen the project I've thought "oh no, another MVC framework!"

Now that I've seen the
{put [status => "shipped"] in "/orders/12345"}
I think it's cool.
Yeah C is good for lots of things, but not great for developing a desktop UI in Windows, when compared to C# for example. You'd be going back to the dark ages of Windows SDK development if you want to do that part in C.
Ask HN: what's the site that is a dir of devs and designers by location?
I'll take my chances with the "dangerous people," personally. There are, presumably, fewer of them, than there are government agents.
Yeah, but mandating a list of global variables though?
Five killer ways to create microcopy
I really liked Linux From Scratch-Couple of years back It helped to build my own distro -Initially It was around 100MB then I tried to trimmed it down to less than 4MB :P . It was fun.anybody wants to try with their vm check this out http://giis.co.in/minili.iso I guess it should work
I did get that feeling, but i would not have cared as much if he would have shown some awesome before and afters or some real-world examples.
Why I am writing a book about creativity
Not really. Evolution only explains the persistence of traits which influence survival and reproduction. It can't explain why those traits arose in the first place (random mutation), or the existence of traits which don't affect survival or reproduction. It also can't explain why some traits never arose at all (say, winged humans).

And to be really nitpicky, "evolution" is the observed fact that species change over time. It isn't an explanation at all. Natural selection is the explanation for evolution, both in general, and for specific traits.
Here's what this would look like in Forward:

<table>
{foreach "/accounts"|get as $user}
<tr class="{cycle values="odd, even"}">
<td class="user-name">{$user.name}</td>
<td class="user-bio">{$user.bio|truncate:30}</td>
<td class="user-products">{pluralize "{$user.products.count} Products"}</td>
<td class="user-joined">{"M jS, Y"|date:$user.date_created}</td>
</tr>
{/foreach}
</table>
Not sure if "modernized" is appropriate in this context, since productive abbreviation in western languages dates to antiquity, i.e. Latin.
I agree in some sense. This technology as a law enforcement tool is inevitable. I can't see a future in which every national government doesn't use it on some level.

So making it open and promoting discussion about its limits is probably the way to go.
It is funny. I was talking to a kid that was learning to play guitar because he wanted to play cover songs, and was frustrated by the lessons that seemed to have nothing to do with what he wanted. I told him that he didn't have to wait even one more day, since playing covers songs is one of the best ways in which you learn guitar. His ultimate goal could be accomplished almost immediately by choosing one song he liked that only had 3 chords, and just strumming those three cords over and over again in succession until it didn't sound half bad. Would take less than a week, -tops.

It's the same principle, and one I value highly. I think tackling a new discipline, and the wave of information that rushes toward you as you put your toe in the water can sometimes distract us from simple grounded approaches that we know have worked well for us in the past.

Thank you for the links!
lisp is good, java is bad

And this makes Clojure...??

There is plenty of dislike for Lisp and acceptance of Java.
Explain to your boss the cost/benefit of using a higher level language over c.

C's benefit historically has been performance. I think the case for performance is becoming less compelling for 2 reasons:

1) The performance gap is closing, thanks in particular to projects like cython that let you write python code that gets converted over and compiled as c++ that's often more performant than the c++ code that devs might write themselves.

2) In general, the cost of hardware continues to drop while the cost of developers goes up. C takes longer to write than eg Python--I don't care who you are, it does. And if you're the god programmer of C, you probably cost a lot.

So what would be the benefit of c for your boss really? It will cost more to develop, and the performance gains may not be as noticeable. It would quite possibly be bad business.
Flagged per the guidelines.

> ... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
This, on top of the $451,000,000 already spent on its Sentinel Case Management System.

http://www.informationweek.com/government/enterprise-applica...
If your speed of development is glacial because the language you are writing in is just a hop skip and a jump away from ASM, then the language you are writing in is inadequate.
Search Engine Optimisation for the BBC websites
I don't mind the self-deprecating humor, but it may put off others. Keeping the landing page professional and straight to the point may be to your benefit if you plan on selling your product in the future. If you plan on keeping it free and open sourced, it probably doesn't matter and may even help with donations.

Also, just because an idea is simple doesn't mean it's not a great idea.
Show HN: Today we launched our HTML5/responsive Web app. What u think?
beautiful. stoked to start playing with it.
Not half as bad as not having a system, and having to spend significant mental resources on keeping track of what to do, what to prioritize, when to do them, etc. Not having to think about that meta-information frees up resources to actually do things.
I don't mean just abbreviation, I mean Arabic hasn't seen certain types of changes that have occurred in Western languages. Although, arguably, Latin has always been fundamentally a non-cursive script, and Arabic has always been cursive, perhaps.
I write C# for mono and I've never had a portability issue.
I love the Atmel parts if for no other reason that you can get an Atmel branded version of the segger ICE probe for 'free' from them.
Windows Phone 8 SDK - By Appointment Only
My biggest mistake was trying to decide which language was most suitable. I kept reading article after article about the advantages of ruby over python, or why nodejs is better than anything else.

In the end I just ended up writing my prototype in PHP (ironically the language that no one recommended - and most hated) simply because it was so simple to jump right in and get started. More so because PHP ran on the server I used to host my static HTML/CSS files.

My first side project is www.youfm.org and its doing great (150k hits, 40k uniques, hundreds of people spending over 5 hours on the site).

So the most important advice I can give is to just pick a language and dive right in. Don't worry about the right language, don't worry about which is the easiest to learn, or scales the best, or anything like that. Just pick any one and start coding.
If looked at from a distance, with the creation of globalization, (free) trading blocks, 'interdependence' (inter means 'to bury', mind you), we are becoming borderless and so the bad guys no longer reside in such-and-such country. The 'terrorist' is everywhere, the 'terrorist' is/could be you. Thus the idea is to let the gov't deal with it, to protect you against you.

Btw, 'love' the argument that 'If I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?'
Weekly Cloud Recap: Netflix Eureka, Nexus 1000V, Defining the Open Cloud
It's interesting how the nofollow tag has evolved over the years. Originally, people used it not only to control blog SPAM but also to shape the way PageRank flowed throughout a site - a method called PageRank Sculpting. The idea was you'd nofollow links to unimportant pages on your own site so that more PageRank would flow to the important pages you wanted to rank for.

I'm pretty sure Google has confirmed this doesn't work anymore. Now a nofollow link still takes a portion of a page's PageRank just without passing it along. Hence, no more sculpting power.
Agree.

Learning the fundamentals doesn't mean not doing actual programming at the same time. You have to code to have a better understanding on the fundamentals.

My personal experience is that after many years of programming, the fundamentals I learned in school still help me get better. There were many such moments that you were digging into some interesting technical topic and you suddenly realized that some fundamentals had another layer of meaning or application you didn't know or I didn't fully understand before.

Also, understanding different types of programming languages, like OOP, FP, logic programming, declarative programming, etc. help improving one's programming skills, no matter what programming you primarily use at work.
So it's OK for the programmer to be 'unreasonable' but not for the manager?

Progress is actually made by teams of people working together for a common goal.
MongoDB makes deleting records easier. Forward has a trash can:

{get $order from "/orders/123"}

{put $order in "/trash"}

Now the order is no longer in the "orders" collection in MongoDB, instead it's in the "trash" collection. You can still get it by ID though:

{get $order from "/orders/123"}
{$order|dump} -- Still here! But not really here.

We can just as easy pull the document out of the trash and put it back where it was.

It's the reason you see we can delete documents without even a warning in the demo (http://demo.getfwd.com).
I agree with having all/most software developed with taxpayer money be open-sourced. It might even lower the total costs if others contribute to it.
La nouvelle Ford Fiesta arrive, la hotte pleine de nouveautés 
La gamme Fiesta de Ford est en pleine révolution. Le constructeur automobile n’a de cesse de l’améliorer, ajoutant des nouveautés issues des dernières technologies.
totally annoyed with his #3 as well. Been working with a folks who want everything to be decided by the "designer" first and make copy-perfect photoshop templates first - even if they're not that happy with the design.

This introduces an annoying 'waterfall' process where I can't test whether the designer's ideas actually work in-browser and practice until they're officially 'done'.

CN to managers: don't make a designer your product todo list. use a system for that and accept some quirks and broken-ness at first.

Read quora's photoshop-less design process for an alternative (and arguably better) approach: http://www.quora.com/Joel-Lewenstein/Joels-Posts/Life-Withou...
I would find explicit character types as useful, but I wouldn't conflate their representation with character escape codes.

Common Lisp represents characters as such:

(char "r" 0)
> #\r

Which would make parsing input streams simpler.
This is a very thorough and useful guide. I've always been pretty turned off by the SEO "community" as guides like this mostly come across as guesswork and quackery.

On a personal note I read Andrew's ebook a while ago (which is very good) and had a brief email conversation with him. He struck me as very genuine and knowledgeable guy - even if he was an investment banker! :-)
Are these things that were helpful or got you started?

I don't think anyone is challenging the value of studying those topics. It just seems to be general consensus you don't start with them.
And it's not as if the government has any resources it doesn't take from its citizens. When we let the government make buying decisions for us through subsidies, consumers inevitably lose.

This is a perfect example. Instead of consumers voting with their dollars, a portion of their vote is confiscated by politicians. The money is then put towards the interests of politicians, not those of consumers.

Best-case scenario: politicians choose exactly what serves consumers best.

Worst-case scenario: politicians serve special interests and don't choose what's best for consumers.

Not only is the best-case scenario extremely unlikely, it is exactly what would have happened absent any government subsidies.
http://collabfinder.com/

http://www.builditwith.me/
According to the article, that drug is sugar in a gelcap...
Widely available face recognition could potentially threat societies in cities.

What would we gain from this? Targeted ads when walking in to your local store? Never having to tag another photo again? (that one is just awesome, but what else?)

Personally this is a tech that I would gladly postpone as long as possible, or at least until the whole tech-thing has stabilized. Most governments still want and think it is within their right to censor internet and is as eager as ever to criminalize cryptography - do we want such immature governments to have this tool in their arsenal as well?
In that case, you can just get a VOIP number for 8 cents or whatever.
Thanks boothead! Spent a lot of time trying to distill SEO down to the need-to-know concepts without skipping over anything major. Glad you enjoyed the eBook, and thanks for not writing me off based on my past career! ;-)
It's just a function of the increase in topic breadth.

When you get to articles about technical details, I still see the quality comments as before.

It's just that there are more tech-fashion articles and "bitch about the policy of company X" articles and political articles where comments inherently trend much more toward the subjective and thus half the audience is certain that half the posts are 'crap'.

And the audience pulled in by that growth in topic breadth still reads the more-technical articles. So the vaguely political/tribal quips that I'd always noticed strewn about in even the technical threads are no longer politely ignored, but become points of tangential debate.

It's pretty much inevitable with growth.
Hardware interaction is the place where mono fails most often in my experience; portability for something that actually touches the underlying hardware (of any type) is probably not possible using c#.
Yeah, though as ocharles and alexchamberlain (and myself, actually) have mentioned, it has now been implemented as of January 2012. The issue now is that it doesn't seem to be enabled by default (afaik) and doesn't seem to work with all packages.

As for pacman itself - I agree. Great name and one of the fastest package managers I've ever used.
Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not
pollute threads too much.

I really like the idea of private comments for this case.

Wild tangents, pedantry, grammar/spelling corrections, personal questions, (constructive) criticism could all be optionally made private and avoid clutter in the threads
Ask PG: any plans for a YC startup book?
By now YC and its startups must have created lots of invaluable knowledge on how to start and run a startup. Has YC considered distilling all of this knowledge and publish it as a book? I'm positive that there are lots of potential tech entrepreneurs around the world who would love to do startups the YC way but can't move to Silicon Valley and be part of YC for lots of different reasons.
Ask HN: What about a community-driven paste service?
Hi hackers !

I launched a really really simple paste service ( http://yaap.it ). It's a fully community-driven project. For now, the paste service has no extra (useless ? YOU decide.) features. To participate, go to the github repo: http://github.com/SeyZ/yaapit

My questions are:

- Do you use a paste service ? If yes, which ones ?

- I hate abusive advertising. And you ?

- Do you care about the privacy control of the paste content (encrypted paste) ?

- Do you care about a new community-driven paste service ?

(Feature request are welcome ! http://github.com/SeyZ/yaapit/issues)
Weak performance of Eclipse 4.2 criticised
All Kindle Fires sold to US customers will have home screen ads
From Wikipedia:

Leon Chua, who is considered to be the father of non-linear circuit theory, has argued that all 2-terminal non-volatile memory devices including phase change memory should be considered memristors. Stan Williams of HP Labs has also argued that phase change memory should be considered to be a memristor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory