skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So how do we convince programmers (architects?) to use languages and programs that are small, which due to lack of features appear to have lots of restraints? (really they don't; but one needs to be creative) How do we produce specs that are not the result of committees and packed with everyone's favorite feature? (and thereby masochistic for any mortal to try to implement)

See the 1999 interview with Ken Thompson that luriel posted earlier. It has some great comments about these dynamics.

When I say "counterintuitive", I am referring to most programmers, judging by what's said in forums like this one, will _not_ be receptive to perceived restraints. They will believe it limits what they can do. Instead, they will see a langauge where there are multiple ways to do the same thing with the same effectiveness as somehow more flexible, making them more productive. They want hundreds of libraries. They want IDE's. They do not want to write things in Scheme. Some even hate the command line. I say these things about "most" programmers. Not all. (thankfully)

Again, Thompson's comments are insightful here. Many programmers are cogs in a corporate wheel. They have little opportunity to be creative. They want to save time and effort in any way possible.

But some people, the increasingly rare few, will see things differently. I side with Thompson's preference in that I cannot understand large languages where I have to work from the top down and read a 500 page manual to try to understand all the components. I cannot manage that degree of complexity as easily as I can I can work with something simple and build things from the bottom up. (Alas, the things I can build do not amount to a UNIX kernel! :)

So, yeah, it's not counterintuitive to me. It makes perfect sense. But I don't find myself agreeing with most comments about these issues I see in forums. I can't even read StackOverflow. The herd mentality is overbearing.
Visualizing topics discussed by the US 2012 Presidential Candidates
Dart provides a complete "Batteries included" solution, i.e. Dart IDE, package manager, core libs, etc.
Optional typing enables IDE's to maintain richer knowledge about your code, enabling proper intelli-sense and refactoring support. Dart IDE's intelli-sense is smart it can even infer types inside string literals:

http://news.dartlang.org/2012/08/dart-editor-improves-on-cod...

var v = document.query("input#id");

v. //brings up intelli-sense for InputElement

You can also debug natively in Chrome or inside the Dart IDE. JetBrains are also developing their own plugin for Dart: http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?idea&id=6351

It also transpiles to JS (like CoffeeScript) but also includes a Dart VM which contains innovative features like Snapshotting for instant start-up times.
Josh Foer gave a good TED talk about this topic, you can watch it at

http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_...

After seeing this I actually was able to use his technique to help remember all the parts of a long wedding toast I had to deliver. It definitely worked in this situation, though I'm not sure how applicable it would be for cataloguing every day information you may or may not need to recall.
If you are a coder or writer (or both!) who is lucky enough to have a backyard and likes building things, why not build your own:

https://leanpub.com/diygardenoffice

Disclaimer: this book is a work in-progress [there are currently 65 pages], and I'm the cofounder of Leanpub, where it is published...
The bulb featured there is the most reasonable retrofit I have seen. Too bad that hundreds of dollars of bulbs and controller don't make much sense for small places.

I wonder how much they have looked at sticking the electronics into switches that would fit inside of normal lamps (probably without the dimmer) or chips for televisions (the $30 LED bulb sort of suggests that they are charging plenty for a simple controllable outlet, at $45).
Luckily there are easy to use tools to remove Kindle DRM and treat the book as if it were something you bought.
You lost me at "if they like, we get paid, if not something to put in your portfolio...", especially when preceded with the lure of $7-10k for 3 days.
Perl has this too: https://metacpan.org/module/Shell

Written in 1994, by Larry himself!
The term "app" was in use before smartphones even existed, so no.
Dart does compile to JS while CoffeeScript retains a one-to-one mapping between CoffeeScript and JavaScript. Read the "golden rule."[0]

[0]: http://coffeescript.org/
This totally rocks. Over the years I have done what feels like a lot of M&A work but its nothing close to what a VC does day in and day out. My daughter is in DECA (which is a business oriented club in school) and she enjoys looking at the business aspects and seeing how folks to aren't emotionally invested in the product work through it. And DECA does role plays that are a lot like this, pitching to some experts your view of the business, so it helps with that as well.
You can find the same content here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4530929
It's not Indo-European. It's Indian language Sanskrit which is mother of all languages influenced English.
Due to people can't accept that they carry something which is borrowed or adopted, they started adding their names in it. It's the bitter truth.
Crazy to see how they raised $100,000 in a little over 24-hours.
> Maybe I'm off the mark, but whenever I see a long runon procedure full of if-then-else, I think "This is a job for a state machine!"

I'm a big fan of state machines, but systems like this are often multitasking and (for all practical purposes) stateless. OTOH it might be more accurate to say their state is formally unpredictable.

A system like the one being described would be more like a multi-threaded critical-path flowchart, where multiple processes are active at a given time. And at any time a high-level linear programming result might mandate a change of strategy based on available resources, even though individual processes continued to follow the tactical flowchart.

So even though a state machine approach looks attractive (as it always does), it's a matter of deciding how many states and how many levels. Because of the nature of the original problem and the number of connections with everyday reality, the fact that it was a state machine might escape the attention of even a careful observer.
LAPD Spy Device Taps Your Cell Phone
> Having said that, I think they could find some success in, say, making Chrome run Dart natively

That would fragment the web, just like if Microsoft made IE run .NET natively (or, like Microsoft made IE run ActiveX).

So hopefully that won't happen.
>Since free software is so pervasive these days, it might not be very hard to find something within a company's product portfolio that depends greatly on free or open source software. Once discovered, all it takes is a claim of license violation like this one to shut down that software

That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when modified and distributed/sold.
This will changes as reputation of the shop changes. You can't expect a company to fork over that kind of money only to have nothing done.
since many realized they are not needed...?

why do you need semicolons?
Getting enough sleep might be the most important thing.
I don't know the latency of SATA off the top of my head, but I would assume it would be less then that of Wi-Fi. With the way the OS currently controls hard drives, this proposal probably just won't work. Since this pretty much rules out an OS drive over Wi-Fi (lots of random reads), we could instead think of a NAS setup for mass storage. So we have a small NAS with Wi-Fi, with samba or NFS protocols, and use it as a storage drive.

Personally though, I don't mind having an internal SSD in my laptop (although it is a bit small, really should get a bigger one). I also don't mind cables for external storage drives. As for Wi-Fi, I usually have a hard time hitting the maximum bandwidth of my AP (where maximum bandwidth is slightly less then half the connection speed). Wi-Fi is also prone to interference. One interesting thing about the 802.11 ac spec is that it now supports channel bonding on upto eight channels, which severely limits the 5GHz band, which was supposed to take away all the congestion we have on 2.4GHz.
The world is really no longer divided into countries or geographic regions (although politicians like to think otherwise), I feel I have a lot more in common with a programmer in Germany, France or China than the red-neck farmer who lives up the road. We communicate in English simply because the USA dominates (and continues to dominate) the technology and science areas.
I wouldn't call it a cookbook.

It is an (unusually large) cheatsheet.
This is a matter of degree.

Dart's types do not affect runtime behavior (at least in the compiled-JS route), so basic types are quite close to JavaScript's, much like CoffeeScript.

There are also no features in Dart that cannot be compiled into JS, like say threading with shared state.

So overall I think it is reasonable to say that both Dart and CoffeeScript are close to JavaScript and built specifically to compile into it.
I program in Python (no semicolons) and I also frequently split long statements over multiple lines. One doesn't need an explicit statement terminator to do it. You can do it inside parentheses for ex.
Flexible Solar Panels with 80% Efficiency
Could we (as in, everyone) please stop referring to something we find stupid or dumb in general as "retarded"? It's offensive.

Sorry, this just bugged me.
>Since both of Twin Peaks' products are released under a proprietary license, there was no source code of any changes it made to mount released, which is a violation of the GPLv2.

Seems like Twin Peaks could resolve this by just releasing the source code to their version of mount. Maybe Red Hat will be able to get damages out of it, but if Twin Peaks releases the code in a timely fashion, I doubt Red Hat will be able to get an injunction against their product sales. (IANAL.) Meanwhile, the patent suit goes on.
Ask PG: Does YC have experience with founders who were employed on H1b visas?
The H1b work visa can be transferred to another employer, however, my read is that it does not allow one to start/found a business. Given that there is a very substantial hacker population in this category, I was wondering if YC/others have already solved this problem. It can't be that all the folks on skilled work visas are locked out of playing, can it?
I think giving it any name raises expectations. And a female name hints at the software being as useful as a secretary. "Siri, take a memo"

(Not that all secretaries are women. I'm talking about stereotypes here. Also I'm not even sure that's a job that still exists.)
I'm not familiar with the specifics in this case, but if it's like most other cases they're not pushing for 35 years. They're pushing for him to take a much shorter sentence by threatening 35 years. (It's still ridiculous, but my point is they probably don't think 35 years is appropriate for his crime -- they think 35 years is appropriate for getting him to accept their deal)
Yes, what you said better than I did.
I like PBS (now sh.py) for certain use cases. If I'm writing an actual shell script, I think it is brilliant. It keeps the script focused on the task at hand instead of Python's somewhat painful process communication.

On the other hand, if I have an application that needs to communicate with a subprocess as a small piece of the whole, I'll use other methods that are less "magical". It's not that I'm inherently against magic, but rather that, in that use case, I generally want very explicit control over what is happening.
Weekend projects are guaranteed to be fun. A job is, unfortunately for a lot of people, not.

Convincing people to have less fun and work a second job is a hard sell -- made harder because most people who are capable of building something in a weekend already have pretty well-paying jobs.
For a longer list (though the explanations are briefer), see Zenspider's Ruby QuickRef[1]. It also includes a handy listing of predefined global constants[2] (and a lot more).[3]

[1]: http://zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html#pre-define...

[2]: http://zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html#pre-define...

[3]: http://zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html
I couldn't agree more - motivation is everything! I love that quote. Another to add: "Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence." - Helen Keller
are there other programs like this but with a focus on aerospace/aeronautics?
Zuckerberg’s discussion of search
My favorite saying on motivation, which your experience seems to prove is "motivation is acquired, not required".
Analyzing the iPhone 5 Geekbench Results
This trick is handy to break DPI systems or firewalls (Like China's).

I remember few years ago I connect to youtube directly in China using a python http proxy by replacing spaces to \t in http request headers. The GFW let the request pass.
I'm the author of that. It's dated, though to my knowledge none of the issues there have yet been resolved, and the trial is scheduled for February 2013. Seth Finkelstein noted < http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001476.html > that a new indictment has been filed, though it is not, at least in my brief skimming, substantially different, it just fills out the details.

There is a much bigger issue in this case, one that comes up surprisingly often: criminal prosecution for "exceeding authorized access." Should we prosecute people who use online services in violation of their Terms of Service? Of employees who, without installing malicious software, snoop around their networks for stuff they shouldn't be seeing? Is any of that worthy of criminal penalties?
What client is going to pay $7-10k for weekend dev's work and "fun"? Who fixes the inevitable bugs afterwards? People pay developers to work on their ideas to exact spec, not to experiment and hack.

You're looking at the market from the supply side, you need to look at it from the demand side which is far more important.
Obviously various optimization techniques can be used essentially as poor-man's machine learners. That doesn't mean they're particularly good at it.

In this case, Genetic Programming uses trees as its representation, and so it could be used as a tree-based classifier, but the OP has already indicated that he expects enormous numbers of rules, necessitating huge trees. For Genetic Programming, this translates into a gigantic search space.

As it was my thesis work, I'm always ready to promote Genetic Programming where appropriate. This is not the place. There are better tools for this task.
I wasn't a huge fan of "Ghost in the Wires"... The book was a decent read but Mitnick comes off as uncaring and short-sighted.
I'm not a conservative. Your argument goes downhill from there.
> No, I am certain you are confusing Genetic Programming [1] for Genetic Algorithms [2].

Trust me. I am not.
So, this feature:

http://amoffat.github.com/sh/index.html#interactive-callback...

Lets you replace `expect` with Python code pretty darn easily.
I don't doubt that ABC approves of 'drama' since it really does help in the ratings. That said, I don't think your other two claims are well supported, that the sharks are 'arrogant' or that their valuations are too low.

Lets look at the valuations first, in any open market where prices are flexible buyers tend to feel folks ask to much and sellers tend to thing folks offer too little. If you walk away from a deal feeling like you didn't pay enough for something or that you sold it for too much money, then that market is out of balance. There are three sharks, I've not seen any credible evidence that they have any anticompetitive agreements in place, basically they seem able (and willing) to jump into another shark's negotiation and screw it up to gain leverage. So of the three of them the valuations are no doubt precisely correct. You might find an investor who is willing to give a higher valuation, but if you did that with full disclosure that these three would not agree to a higher valuation you might find it hard to justify. This disparity often arises from emotional involvement with the concept or the company. The wine-by-the-glass[1][2] guy is a classic example. They disagreed on value, he turned them down, and kept cranking. Were they 'wrong' ? No, the valuation to them was $x and to the owner $y, but they see a different business than the owner does.

As for arrogance, these folks seem to get a lot of pitches, I'm sure being on TV doesn't help with reducing the volume. The weird thing is, they still listen. You can hear that in their analysis. Arrogance would have them not listening and just telling the person pitching is wrong, but they give them a chance to explain, sometimes repeatedly. Its clear that some of the people coming on the show have done exactly zero homework, haven't even done a network search for starting a business or what it takes to run a business. I am really impatient with folks like that but the sharks take it in stride.

[1] http://www.copadivino.com/

[2] http://www.aoltv.com/2011/03/21/shark-tank-inventor-wine-by-... WARNING HUFFPO Category 5 MONETIZATION
Then I believe Luxembourg blocks it, too...
What do you mean no fonts?
You can try to copy the text out, which is not possible if images are used.
Does anyone have a link to JavaScriptCore/Nitro numbers with the iPhone 5? I'm really curious if the improved performance is helping in the browser...
I wrote something similar on top of nodejs to simplify some problems at Game Closure.

http://www.github.com/gameclosure/jash

It's probably not ready for prime time - past it's initial use cases it hasn't been tested much. Things like sh.py and jash are a really neat solution for some problems.
The original post was about a "slightly better java", so you're right, I tried to enumerate some features that might be interesting to a Java developer.

I really don't like X vs Y stuff (too many subtle and contextual issues), so I'm just trying to help the original commenter dig a little deeper.
I have found this extremely useful - used it to write many things - from a set of scripts that bootstrap chef server onto a node from scratch to a file chunking program that optimizes log files to align with hadoop block sizes using multiprocessing and this. It made a lot of things very easy.

This version introduces many positive changes: specially 'Iterating over output' that I have been waiting for a long time.

Andrew wants to increase his support for MacOS and would like to have test results from "python setup.py test" (to run the whole test suite). One identified bug is: http://bugs.python.org/issue15898

I would love to see more people use this to simplify their work!

If anyone is interested in looking into the scripts I wrote to see what's possible, let me know.
Shows how much they care :-)
Reindent Text in Sublime
Yeah, known issue.
Currently I've no idea how to fix it :(
"The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time" - Henry Ford. I say stay on your vision. There are a lot of variables in your competitors' execution that could affect their traction. Execute well and focus on a kick-*ss value proposition, nail your brand and price-point, and add a bit of emotional design for good measure. You could then find that they fear you, not the other way around. Best of luck!
> Why does Dart look so boring?

So it appeals to the widest (and thus) more average programmer.

Languages have an implicit audience and purpose. For example I consider Java a language designed to be consumed by code-monkeys. The mentality that you have a large enterprise project and you look to India to hire 200 programmers to finish it for you. The language has to have static typing, it has to be familiar to those learning previous languages (C++, C), IDEs are the preferred work environments, everything is very explicit and verbose.

Take Haskell, it is a language that would appeal to an academically minded developer. Someone who knows about catamorphisms, uses words like endofunctor, or say wouldn't mind struggling for weeks to comprehend what a Monad is.

Those are 2 different audiences. Neither language is better or worse, they are just tools and in some cases one is a better fit, in other case another one is.

Dart is closer to the Java.. It wants to be used in large code bases, by many (including average and junior) programmers. So adding things like fancy list comprehensions, de-structuring assignment, pattern matching and stuff like that, might not fit with its goals.
AFAIK, IE8 doesn't support enough HTML5 stuffs, so no.
IE9 should be OK
I've got clients that are interested and it's been done with lot's of overhead at regular hackathons except, the devs you get are a crap shoot and lots of distractions that hinder the process of actually shipping something.
I am late to this discussion, but I would like to ad my experiences with compiling rules to a Rete network. I have done a lot of hacking on the old Lisp OPS5 code and found it easy to work with, once you read and understood Charles Forgy's papers. I hacked OPS5 to support multiple data worlds and a few other enhancements for specific projects.

The more modern Rete based software projects are probably also easy to work with.
Direct link: http://nationalmediamuseumblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/edwa...

Also previously submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4513662
+1, and this can be complimentary to fabric like scripts too to make pretty powerful scripts!
I recently did this for my girlfriend, for about $200 and two weekends we converted an old garden tool shed into her film scoring and sound design studio. I can see her productivity skyrocket when she went from working in the house to working out in the studio. I really think it is about a single focus in a cozy space that has a single purpose.
I've tried and succeeded with CYGWIN.
But no idea how can I distribute the package with the dependencies.
Probably not, as font conversion is slow.
pdftohtml does not extract fonts for now.
For anyone looking for a nice subprocess library for Ruby, my friend Greg released one earlier this week - https://github.com/gdb/rubysh
> That paragraph actually makes it sound scary to even use open source software when they actually mean only GPL'ed software and that too only when modified and distributed/sold.

No, you have to comply with the GPL regardless of whether you've modified the source that you're distributing. (As in this case: I'd be surprised if Twin Peaks modified mount -- I don't see why they'd need to.)
Maybe you should build your house yourself while you're at it. Kickstarter is for people who wants to test their idea in a market.
For the most part it's designed to be easy to compile to JavaScript, but there are bizarre exceptions like support for arbitrary precision integers. (I believe this is ignored by the Dart to JS compiler.)
Any advice for city dwellers to build their own writing havens?
Wow, Facebook is already doing 1/3 the search volume of Google, as Zuckerberg says, "without even trying". That's pretty crazy.
Sadly, most of the x10 adapters don't work with LED bulbs. (the "lamp" ones, the "appliance" ones should be okay)
This is great work, thanks for sharing the code!

"Having a low DOD translates to less on your mind and less mental overhead. Less overhead gives a greater ability to focus and less time spent keeping tabs on and switching among happenings throughout your organization."

I wonder if that applies to the number of opened tabs in browsers. Just thinking of my bad habit of leaving many tabs open :)