skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fortran 77 is still pretty widely used in physics, with some relaxed compiler rules that make it a little less ugly. Fortran 90 is however, I find, a lot more like Pascal.

I suspect you're right on Java surviving as a legacy language.

While I'm not sure (and really don't care) if Java or the JVM will survive for an extended period of time, I do find it interesting to note that programming languages seem to be comparatively resilient to change relative to everything else in computing. While the FORTRAN in that photo looks odd, it's still a comparatively small gap between it and FORTRAN from 40 years later than if we were to compare the operating systems, applications or user interfaces from similar time spans. I can still figure out what it's supposed to do. I'd be completely lost if you put me on a batch terminal or a VAX/VMS prompt.

The last really transformational idea in programming languages hit the world the same year I was born -- in 1980 -- with Smalltalk. There are a lot of variations on the themes of functional, imperative, and object oriented languages, and I expect new metaphors will evolve, but it's interesting seeing that really, now for at least the last almost 30 years, we've basically been remixing ideas.

And that's where I'd revisit Java for a moment -- perhaps the only transformational change that it brought to the table was the use of a formalized VM in a widely popular language. Even if Java's VM doesn't survive, I'm pretty sure that's a notion that we'll still have in programming environments for many decades out.
I dunno. I think it's wrong to view genius as being an inherent quality of a person. I think it's equally wrong to view it as an external force that just happens to visit people at certain times.

In my experience, genius is the result of turning over a problem in your head over and over, learning all the angles, and then relaxing and forgetting about it for a while. While you're forgetting about it, your brain can make subconscious connections between everything you've learned that seem to come from nowhere. But you have to have the background knowledge.

I find that I have tons of creative ideas when I'm just starting out a project. They almost all turn out to be bad ones. Then once I explore a bit, learn everything there is to know about the area, I'll occasionally get a decent idea. If I don't think too hard about it.
The amazing intelligence of crows [video]
I’m sorry but this woman makes me angry. A lot of it is my background. I grew up living in Government funded housing and eating thanks only to the welfare system. That, combined with working my way up to the point that I now have money as an adult, makes me see financial matters differently than others around here.

I accept that.

But give me a break. Boo Hoo, her house is only worth $700,000 now. She spent nearly $50,000 upgrading it and now its worth less. Oh the Horror.

I get that it hurts when you have to go down a step in your standard of living. I’m not entirely unsympathetic. But there are millions working to have a place to live at all. So I can’t spare much sympathy for this woman.

Short sell the house, find a place you can afford and shut the hell up. Getting kicked out of your $700,000 house is not the end of the world
If people are going to University because everyone else is than they are in turn going to University based on what they think everyone else's reasoning is.

Doing something because everyone else does it doesn't imply any consideration for everyone else's reasons. It indeed suggests the opposite.
Yes, I hear everyone loves bacon over at reddit.
images don't have anything to do with html/css
Article I Sec. 10
No State shall ... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts...

So the government cannot interfere with contracts already entered into and, unless the government owns the company outright, cannot interfere with any future contracts between the company and the executive.

Also, private parties such as between banks and clients can agree to whatever terms they wish, but the Article I clearly states that the government cannot do the same.
It sounds like he's no longer able to pay the mortgage because his business has fallen off a cliff. Customers that were willing to part with their money in good economic times have disappeared in bad economic times.

It'd be really easy to blame him for taking out a mortgage he can't afford, but this is what happens in recessions. While the money supply is being inflated, some investments that are marginal (like his business, apparently) seem pretty attractive. When the money supply starts contracting, they suddenly get squeezed out of existence - which forces them to default on their debts, which further contracts the money supply. Financially, the right thing for this guy to do is to let the bank foreclose, but in the short run that'll make things worse for everyone else.
As if that alone isn't enough reason.
Ward Cunningham interviews Ron Jefferies and Chet Hendrickson about Technical Debt (video)
Err, they're not interfering with contracts -- they're offering a contract. I agree it would be wrong for Congress to alter a contract between two parties, but that's not what's happening. They're offering a line of credit and the terms for that credit include some stipulations on executive pay.

Likewise, if you agree to accept unemployment benefits, there are strings attached to that too.

Surely you will concede that Congress has the right (obligation, really) to stipulate how taxpayer money is spent? That, by itself, is not a violation of anything.
Retail Growth Already Skyrocketing in 2009
I never left my Blackberry... when I first saw my buddy finally whip out his BB after struggling for 5 mins to find a location on a map... a knew i'd keep mine...

Then I meet my best friend for lunch to weeks in a row. Both days, he's having iPhone problems and just can't bring himself to return it...
This article reminded me of the story of Robert Oppenheimer. In that case, at least, I think the story of how we destroy our heroes rings true.

If any of you enjoy biographies, stories of scientific and engineering heroism, and haven't read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," please do. It is an extraordinary story.
If she's waiting for Congress to help her, then she's really in trouble.
Nice talk, I wish there was more time at the end for him to talk about his ideas for mutually beneficial "arrangements" like the one idea of crows picking up trash after events etc.
Frankly, I don't know. It seems the most creative people are
also self-confident. They're both arrogant and humble. Plus, we should rate someone's achievement by his best output, not
his thousands failures.
What would happen if she stopped paying on the HELOC for now until her personal business conditions improve.

It is in second position, certainly would not help her credit score, but might offer some short term relief without worry of losing the house?
Zumeo Tries To Be Gen-Y’s LinkedIn
I've seen that before twice: in both cases, it meant that it steps on someone's or some group's ego or politics, and then there's no small brigade of internet trolls sent out to deliver Amazon justice.

I've never seen that in fiction, though.
Google App Engine Blog: A roadmap update
Ask HN: Help me make HN work well on the iPhone
I feel bad that I still haven't produced a variant of HN that works well on an iPhone. A helpful user just sent me what he says is the minimum I'd have to do.

http://www.archub.org/wohl.txt

But I've learned that code people send by email generally doesn't work. ("It doesn't work." "Oops, I forgot, you also have to..." "It still doesn't work." etc.)

So I'd appreciate it if someone would produce a verbatim, tested snapshot of the HN frontpage that shows the minimum amount of stuff I'd have to change to make the site work decently on an iPhone. (I know I need bigger arrows; you can make those too if you want.)
'sticking electrodes on people and trying to quantify creativity with statistical analysis.'

Or taking excessively precise measurements of the shape of people's heads. ;-)
From TFA:

Wired.com: The subtitle of your book predicts a "coming dark age." Do you really believe this?

Jackson: Dark ages are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget how to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-white thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficient future society is very sobering.

The translation:

Wired.com: The subtitle of your book predicts a "coming dark age." Do you really believe this?

Jackson: Of course not. But I was hoping to sell more books that way.
Understandable (avoiding the appearance of advertising). I actually need auditing and was being lazy about shopping around.

tptacek, you're right about life being too short for that BUT in some cases an entity really does need to ensure compliancy.
Facebook is mostly used for actual friends (well more than Twitter) and limited to real life relationships. That's true at least for the core demographic of college students. Twitter is much more about networking with new people.

So despite having similar or close to identical functionality technically, they have very different functions.
Oppenheimer himself at his 1954 security clearance hearings denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of Communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist party apparatus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer destroyed himself, allying himself with the only orthodoxy [but somehow being not orthodox] that was more murderous than fascism.
Unlocked Nokia 2760 Red
Introducing Nokia 2760 a multi featured existing handset for you by the Nokia, which gives the best familiarity with its features and glamorous look. Camera of 640*480 pixels (VGA) captures images and listening music in the handset is the superb of all with 3GP-MPEG music and video player with supporting FM radio.
Agreed. This has serious implications and I wonder if there are any other potential systems to be tapped.

Dolphins cleaning up the oceans?
This is seriously useful-awesome.

Seeing one gem's progress is great. I would love to see a more abstract view of gem ecosystem as a whole and how much activity there seems to be going from failing to working.
Try it:

http://bacolicio.us/http://news.ycombinator.org/
I gave a one-star review to Sarah Lacy's book on Web 2.0. It wasn't politics as much as truly shoddy journalism. She attributed thoughts and opinions to me without actually asking what I thought on the subject (she was basically fed info from digg PR). My negative review probably looked like a PR thing, when in fact it was a personal reaction to plain old shoddy work.
The white board vinyl works best if you use it to repair some old whiteboards. You get the old ones for free, that are scratched and suffering from the can't-quite-erase-completely problem, and then cover them. You can also convert a chalkboard into a whiteboard this way.

If you start from scratch, you have to get something extremely smooth I guess -- maybe formica countertop material would work.

In answer to the general question, the best place to get used office furniture is in the dumpsters and loading docks of office buildings.
Or your sarcasm detector is giving false positives.
Offer the icombinator.net guy a little something.
The Blackberry Bold is an excellent device. I prefer the iPhone for the stuff that I do - I rarely need a keyboard - but the Bold is beautiful.
Twitter OAuth Documentation
It seems like a good idea to me. Ads for travel related services usually pay a lot, so maybe it can pay for itself. However you should be doing it mainly because you want it to be done, I don't think it will make a lot of money.

I will check back to see how the site evolves.
Heh, you wound me sir. I had pulled down HN and tested the mods.

Here are the URLs to test on the phone.

http://lookerupper.com/hn/news.html
http://lookerupper.com/hn/comments.html

Obviously not an optimal iPhone interface, but enough for reading/login/voting.
The only reason that line has become the focal point of the essay's tone is because we're discussing this on "Mr. Graham's" site.
The "contract" in TARP stipulates that Treasury purchase mortgage-back assets from financial institution in exchange for non-voting shares of the institution.

So not only salary are negotiated between company and management, two private parties, Treasury still do not have the right to "condition benefits on the nonassertion of rights".

Also, because the power to delegate TARP money was given to Treasury, something Napolitano also considered unconstitutional, and that the plan to cap executive salaries belongs to Obama, not Congress, Congress will have no role in setting these conditions.

So not only Congress do not have the right to make these stipulations, they're not even the ones doing the stipulating.
I concur, but I wanted to get the point across as succinctly as possible, without going off on that particular tangent.
The grievances were:

* Experimenting with eliminating grades.

This was the issue at hand anyway.

* Altering a course curriculum with student input.

Every teacher does this to some extent; there aren't enough details to judge (i.e. did he make a class on physics into one on cooking?).

* Criticism of his peers for paternalistic teaching methods.

Not enough details, but it sounds like it was restricted to emails and was therefore just words..

* Held a popular course on activism that the university cancelled the next year.

Can't fully judge from this; maybe this class was popular cause it was one where he was experimenting with giving free A's. Or maybe it was popular because it was good.

* "[...] [M]ade headlines after 10-year-old twins registered for his course with their mother – and he supported the filing of a human-rights complaint claiming ageism when the university said they couldn't stay."

Supporting their filing shouldn't be grounds for dismissal; sounds like he was just going through the appropriate channels. He didn't e.g. let them come into the class in defiance of the rule, he just supported their appeal.

* Doesn't shy away from expressing his view that Isreal commits military aggression

If expressing the opposing view can't make you lose tenure, expressing this one shouldn't either. Unless they want an Orwellian culture.
The presence of a slice of bacon doubles the loss of productivity I've already achieved by being here. Well-played.
Actually, my reason for writing pg is that icombinator crashes often (especially rendering comments) and hides several site features in trying to create a pleasing interface, whereas I did the minimal necessary for sizing and all the features of HN are untouched.

But thank you, icombinator author. And the folks before them (blanking on the YC funded company) that offered something similar, for a time.
Also, receiving unemployment benefits doesn't cap my salary of my next job nor require me to relinquish any other rights.
Funny, I did the exact opposite.

edit: Just to expand -- I got given a BlackBerry for work purposes and it drove me crazy. Generally terrible user experience, unintuitive, and aesthetically awful. Funnily enough, since the iPhone was my first smartphone, I actually found it difficult transitioning to a physical keyboard. I got too used to be able to button mash and have it auto-correct.
I logged in just to vote you up.
Oh I would definitely hit up http://www.colr.org :)

...unless my project IS www.colr.org.

Then I stick with white and gray.
There's part of that, sure. But they don't have to care that much. It means a lot that they still do.
I'm going to have to disagree with that. It took surprising insight for the Woz to look at the same parts catalogs as everyone else and then (without even having the parts at first) do such extraordinary things with them. Many people had access to the parts, more experience, and the technical ability to do this earlier, they just didn't.

The iterative improvement that Apple uses to design and perfect products is somewhat darwinian but it lacks the random mutation and recombinative aspects that define evolution. I'd have to say (since the water has already been clouded by this new little corollary of Godwin's law) that it more nearly approximates intelligent design.
Twitter app for Facebook does it both ways.
Ask HN:  Are patents worthwhile?
I'm nearing a release of something big. It's not what's in my profile, actually something a lot simpler than that, but with very large implications. Think "Quicksilver for the internet." You probably think I'm full of shit, but that's OK.

What are your thoughts on patenting web applications? What I'm working on could pretty easily be copied, which would really break my heart, but hasn't been done yet. It would be along the lines of patenting the "Quicksilver" application for Mac. If you don't know what this is, you hit Ctrl+space, start typing an Application name, and it fills it in for you and executes it for you, giving you ultra-quick access to most used apps. Ctrl+space, then "fi" then Enter would open up Firefox, for example.

Is Quicksilver patentable? Is it worthwhile to patent and idea like this?
RAII is 1995. I don't know what changed in 2005.
Just don't get rolled. I can refer you to some reputable companies, if you'd like.
Not just Woz. Jobs did it too. Back then, and still today. If you think that the people who conceptualized and designed the iPod and iPhone aren't artists through-and-through, you've got another thing coming. The team works together, yeah, but you don't design beautiful things by committee.

Incidentally (to the OP), you always make multiple designs before you pick one. That's not loss of artistic process. I've got three drafts of a single chapter of the book I'm working on now. I've got something like 5 different possible melodies to fit a song I've been Garagebanding. That doesn't take away from the power of the individual when it comes to designing a product. (Considering how in-depth people have looked at Jony Ive's design process and inspiration, I find it sad that people still think Apple products are made through a generic idea-forming process, that the people barely matter in the creation process.

(Also, this author is not a particularly good one, and the fact that she's citing Tom Waits is not a good sign. Waits is a legendary practical jokester and story spinster, and all reports of his songwriting I've read say that he undergoes a very strict process when constructing his songs.)
At $10/meal total, you're feeding 4 people for $2.50 each. A package of chicken breasts costs $9.00, kragen.
Screen shot of the first page on Android:
http://static.3banana.com/pics/lookerupper_news_android-1.0_...

Screen shot of the second page on Android, it seems to be a bit too wide.
http://static.3banana.com/pics/lookerupper_comments_android-...
68 and only able to put 10% down on a house and now about to face foreclosure? What have you been doing with your money all your life?

This is ripe to be picked up on burbed.com.
Yeah, kragen. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a week off and fly my kid to Argentina for a filling.

All due respect to Argentina --- I've got team members from Argentina -- but come on.
Precisely. Any artist that thinks his mind isn't responsible for the beautiful things they create is doing himself a disservice. Perhaps you will never fully understand your mind, but that's a testament to the power of your mind, not a sign that a divine being is necessary.

Frank Zappa had an excellent quote about this. When discussing spiritualism in music with a fellow musician, he said: "Look, these are just instruments. Find out what the range is, and start writing." And that's what it is. Writing music is difficult, and requires a degree of brilliance to come out with even a comparatively mediocre song, but there's no magic to it. It takes work and thought. It doesn't take superstition.
Dental insurance is a bad deal. It mostly involves paying in advance for dental work, at a premium. Note that routine dental work is not something that "insures" well; you can't buy cost-effective insurance for something everyone knows is going to happen.
The other article said it would kill Twitter overnight. I'll check back in the morning.
2 kids, same diet, same hygiene regime; one flawless set of teeth, one mouth full of fillings. (In fact, the bad teeth get even more care than the good teeth).

Some people just have weak teeth.
I thought the link would point here:

http://huddlechat.appspot.com/

With the implied answer to the headline being: because we'll bust your knees if you even think about trying it.
Reddit Supports Site Header Color Customization, Say Goodbye to Hacker News.
Upvote if you've never met anyone who's had problems like this.
How is agreeing with some of the goals of an othodoxy the same as allying with it?
Make a global, all-encompassing wikipedia style wiki. Except that the content will be ONLY eyewitness accounts, i.e., the sources that wikipedia complains about lacking with [citation needed].

For example, if I as a undergrad saw RMS giving himself a sponge bath in the 3d floor men's room of the LCS, than I could put that in there, and that particular bit of lore would not be rumour anymore. Of course you would prefer verified, non-anonymous accounts. If someone put a cell phone video of BART police shooting someone, you might allow that to be anonymous because the video seems hard to fake. I'm sure you would run into many journalistic and ethical questions.

The site would be best for the kind of person who would never have his own website, blog, or write a book, but happened to witness some interesting event in history. For example I have a cousin who was a volunteer fireman and helped search attics and recover bodies in New Orleans after the Katrina. He may never write his autobiography, but those stories in particular ought to be recorded somewhere.

The hard part is the chicken-and-egg part of getting the project started. I'd think you would have to invest quite a bit in seeking people out, and getting them to write content or recording them and posting it as audio (volunteers could transcribe it). It would be a sink of time and money for years and years before it started to stand on it's own, and it might never really pay off economically.
For what it is worth, I have browsed HN on my palm Treo, which has a tiny screen and is pretty far behind what I'd consider state-of-the-art mobile browsing and the user experience is functional when on the HN site.
Economics involves more than just the exchange of money...

For example: Student X, a member of the sports team (any sport will do), has been missing classes, not paying attention to the material, and doing poorly on the assignments. Then, X sleeps through the big exam. X comes to me, saying that (s)he should still be allowed to take the exam. I send X to the dean, and not more than 15 min later receive a phone call from the dean: "Couldn't we just let X take the test?" Me: "X is a poor student, has shown no remorse for missing the exam, and by all right should fail..." Dean: "Yes, but couldn't we let X take the exam?"

True story...X did get to take the exam, and got a C in the course.

The school has sold X a grade in exchange for X playing on the team, which brings revenue in to the school. Even when X isn't an athlete, the school is exchanging tuition revenue for grades.

...it's a shame, but people were really sweating last time the accreditation board did their once-in-a-blue-moon review. All the higher-ups wanted to skate a thin line between remaining accredited and still allowing as many students to get by with Bs and Cs as possible.
Tumblr adds full Twitter integration