skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only caveat is you have to get your friends to join #groupname... you can't arbitrarily say your friend Joe is a member of both #coworkers and #friends... he has to join those groups.

That may be really obvious, but getting everyone you know to self-categorize for your convenience can be a challenge. Being able to label someone for your own purposes is much easier.
Whereabouts Clock displays general whereabouts of family members using cell phone data
Ah, yes, that could work, too.

However, wouldn't everybody (those who I didn't tell to subscribe to my group page) following my twitter account get those tweets?
Carbon Emacs : http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/carbo...

+ Emacs Starter Kit: http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master

+ yasnippet: http://code.google.com/p/yasnippet/

+ paredit: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit

+ Clojure mode: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming/Getting_Sta...

+ Re-mapped Ctrl to Caps. Carbon Emacs defaults Meta to the Command key, which I kept.
I use Cocoa Emacs.app. The only major keybinding change I've done so far (in 2 or 3 months of using Emacs on OS X) is Caps->Ctrl. Getting to alt/option is a thumb-contortion, so I'll probably try out Cmd->Meta soon. Only thing holding me back is the convenience of Cmd+C/X/V.

Cocoa Emacs /does/ have Mac shortcuts on by default. Not sure if they're all there, but save, cut, copy, and paste are certainly bound to the proper OS X shortcut.

As for Aquamacs, I tried it first, but had major issues trying to get it to accept my .emacs. It tries to save a ton of crap to custom-set-variables, including things I set via setq to keep my .emacs file logically laid out. It also tried to save my entire color-theme to custom-set-faces, which is an idiotic thing to do; the color-theme takes up 1111 lines in a nice elisp file off on it's own - why try to stuff it in custom-set-faces?

Anyways, just a warning - you may have issues if you try to give Aquamacs a largish .emacs file you've built up over the years on other systems. But that's probably not a problem for you since you're coming from TextMate.

I use the same .emacs at work (WinXP) as I do at home on my Mac and Linux machines, and Cocoa Emacs played well with it with minute adjustments, so I went with it.
That's exactly what I had in mind.
Very important for the site I run as a side project. :)
I don't really need automated testing tools when I write a small program that I just use myself for some task.

If it works it works, if it doesn't I do it again.
When I was like 13 and CSS was just getting started, I was so excited that I could add decorative styles to things. I mean, I thought it was ridiculous that instead of <b></b> I had to look up some arbitrary thing like "font-weight:bold" and I still to this day have trouble remember how to do italics.. I just looked it up, it's "font-style:italic" and same goes for underline... "text-decoration:underline". Who comes up with these names?

Anyway, I agree... today I no longer fear using tables... and, fuck it, I'm bringing back <b> <u> and <i>.
"Locating Family Values: A Field Trial of the Whereabouts Clock"

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jofish/writing/whereabouts-cloc...
> Indeed. Why fly, when one can instantly Halo?

Do you always take a vendor's claims as gospel?

Me - I have a strong bias toward whatever decision is made by someone who has significant skin in the game. Sure, they make mistakes, but they've got far more relevant experence and incentive to get it right than someone in the cheap seats.

If you think that Halo is usefully better, use it and drive the fossils who go face to face out of biz.
Unless you have an explicit need to hide x group's links from y group, you shouldn't have an issue. If you clearly state "here's the group link page. Use it" and they go there and they subscribe, it's all good. You don't need to control people (no! You can't follow my twitter account!) you just need to provide value (Here's my group link page, with all your shiny links).
Franchise, Real Estate, Business & Estate Lawyers | Einbinder & Dunn
Einbinder & Dunn have extensive experience in litigation and have a strong concentration on franchise law as well as real estate work.
I own a very old student version of Mathematica, not that I can use it, since transferring it to a new machine was beyond my technical abilities, thanks to their copy protection.

At $300 I would buy it, even though I have no specific need, it is a great application.

But I'd hate to spend $300 and only be able to install it exactly once.
That blog is sometimes a revealing read. Evidently they offered +$200k for the dot-com name of a small, mythical, woodland creature. They also: budget $15-20k for patent filings, defend Jellyfish's use of PR firms, detail Alice.com's pre-launch strategy, explain why they see every employee as an animal, and reveal why they'll never hire anyone from Michigan State.
BUT you then have to modify:

while (!compile()) {
fixCompilationErrors();
fixUnitTests();
rewriteUnitTestsThatNoLongerMakeSense();
WriteNewUnitTests();
}

Your iterate loop just became maybe twice or 3 times as long. Less iterations = worse code.
One thing that I dislike about this article is that it implies that there is a dichotomy of programmers, and that it falls like this: new web-savvy developers, and old COBOL mainframe programmers.

This is not true. There are still cool things being done not on the web, and still places for more traditional development.
Google introduces Loopt competitor
Poll HN: CSS or Tables - Do you care?
Over the last few days I've seen way too many CSS vs. tables posts promoted here. My question is, does anyone care? Don't most people know the pros and cons, the hassles of both, and the reasons for using one over the other? My decision on what to use for layout depends on what I'm trying to do: am I way off base here? Is it actually such a hotly debated topic outside of these voices?
It really doesn't matter to me
CSS all the way...it should be used for everything!
Tables are tried and true, forget CSS!
I'm curious as to the pros and cons and like seeing more comparisons
If you explicitly had that need, I feel like a mailing list could serve the same purpose. That being said, I feel like you could set up something to email-blast a group of people with your latest links from twitter for that group.
A friend of mine who's a physicist claims that he's so used to Mathematica that he uses it for everyday scripting tasks, the way other people use Tcl or Perl.
To quote from http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Coding_Horror_Strikes_Again:

Coding Horror is an entertaining, sometimes even educational blog. Be careful diving in headfirst, though, as the technical depth is generally so shallow you'll be hitting the bottom before you've even broken through the surface tension.

Based on what I have (managed to) read at CH I find this description to be fairly accurate.
Don't worry, working with TDD is kind of like wearing a seat belt.

You could do it even if you've never had an accident, many people do.

But most of the time you start doing it AFTER you go off the road once.
Cocoa Emacs.app built from CVS - followed instructions from here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS

Scroll down to section 'Build from source' - note the comment to build from the 'nextstep' directory. I just followed the instructions in 'nextstep/INSTALL')

This is working for me, so far... a good way to get a 'vanilla' install.
Seth Godin's 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market
We had a discussion about this before, where I shared some rough stats from an application I used to run. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415809
A valid point. Most Google products never reach critical mass. But for a device like the iphone you are already using google maps. If its integrated directly into that, the barrier to entry is nothing.
How Harvard Law threw down the gauntlet to the RIAA
how is Mathematica compared to Matlab? As I understand Mathematica is for all kinds of math while Matlab is basically only matrix and linear algebra-stuff(with a lot of libraries for applications of that).

Is Mathematica as good as Matlab for linear algebra?
That analogy doesn't really work - if they came to your site from a particular search term it would seem likely the content is already there.

Even if people are reaching a site based on a mismatched keyword, I wouldn't have thought many people check their logs and update their site because they're getting a lot of hits from a particular term they don't have much for?
Here are two setup descriptions from Clojure guys:
http://paulbarry.com/articles/2008/07/02/getting-started-wit...

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081205.html

They are skewed to Clojure development, but you may be able to pick out a few tips.
I have to disagree with Dr. Greenspun here. Despite the Singularity topic's lack of immediate value some people are still be interested in studying with some of the most famous futurists in the world. Many people (myself included) enjoy learning for the challenge of thinking in new ways and this program at least promises that opportunity.
I know exactly where those meatheads are. They are working for every company I've ever worked for. The larger companies usually have a higher concentration of them.
From Jim Weirich, of Rake fame:

http://github.com/jimweirich/emacs-setup/tree/master

Also, a starter emacs kit for rubyists:

http://github.com/jimweirich/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master
I think this is direct competitor to Twitter; as it includes not only location but a spot for 'Im at starbucks' too; you can also have followers etc...

- just seems to be a competitor; and not many people are seeing that I think.
A example of your first point: Road narrows signs. In my home state of IL, they always (in moderately congested traffic) lead to jams. In MI, they didn't seem to (I have not collected much data there, however), as MI has a law about getting over when you first see signs, not getting over when the lane ends.
If your testing in the code then your doing unit tests. But probably in a poor fashion.

Unit tests should hook into the application in such a way that you can reorder the GUI and change nothing.

If you are using Unit tests correctly then any change to the code base at worst requires 10% of that effort to change the test cases. If you can think of any meaningful change that is worse then that your something is wrong with how you're testing.
That comes pretty close - if only had the possibility to group followers.
During my test drive with that addon I couldn't find such a feature. :(
Sorry to bring back the table vs. css layout debate, but since Google use tables for some parts of their layout, can we assume that this is because it renders faster (and therefore makes more money for them)?
To be so CSS-styleable, CSS Zen Garden uses multiple layers of DIV in DIV in DIV all over the place. Hardly better than table. Also this gem:

<div id="extraDiv1"><span></span></div><div id="extraDiv2"><span></span></div><div id="extraDiv3"><span></span></div>
<div id="extraDiv4"><span></span></div><div id="extraDiv5"><span></span></div><div id="extraDiv6"><span></span></div>
It isn't that much that I don't people to follow my twitter account but I don't want to spam those people with tweets containing links they aren't interested in and about whom I know they won't be. :)
Hence the need of groups.
My favorite algorithm
or simpler:

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1024 | pv > 1GB.bin
Google went to www.giveupandbuyyoutube.com.
37 Signals learned that blogging about certain topics brought success, so they repeated the practice.
I think identi.ca has better way of handling groups. Just check it out http://identi.ca .
I think it's also an instance of reducing rigidity by letting go of what you are most attached to, as in "5. CUT WHAT YOU LOVE" from Joss Whedon on screen writing:
http://dannystack.blogspot.com/2009/01/joss-whedons-top-10-w...

There's also a similarity with "kill your darlings", in creative writing: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1282093

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
Hm, hard to tell from their homepage and they don't offer a tour or something.
But it looks more like a tool to somehow create personalized homepages.
I use the native OSX emacs in the terminal with the fonts increased a fair bit. It loads really fast (~ 1 second) I tried Aquamacs but didn't like the fact that it was significantly slower when starting. I'm a new emacs user so I don't really see the need for all the bells and whistles the larger packages tend to offer. If I need anything I just install it from emacswiki.org. Also I found dotfiles.com quite useful for customising my setup.
I long used emacs in X11, but recently switched to Aquamacs out of sheer laziness - not wanting to recompile emacs+gtk for my new intel mac.
I've tried all the various ports, and Aquamacs is my favorite 'native' port, but I actually miss the X11+gtk build I used before. There's something to be said for an emacs that feels like emacs :)

I agree that the option key is no good as Meta - Cmd is Meta in my setup.

I absolutely override the Mac keybindings.
I like having M-Q as fill-paragraph, and I found that other useful commands were being hijacked by useless OS X Text Services (like M-> for end of buffer got stolen by OmniOutliner)

I have a large 1920x1200 display that I tend to use with one emacs frame maximized, and some arrangement of windows inside that frame - most often I have a full height window on the left, and two half-height windows on the right. Sometimes I use three columns of windows, and other times four equal-sized windows makes sense.

One of those windows is almost always running zsh inside ansi-term (M-x ansi-term). Some prefer shell-mode, but I think ansi-term and zsh are more useful. I don't think shell-mode and zsh cooperate too well.

Most of my work is done in python, and I just started using pymacs and ropemacs, which seem useful. Notes on them are here: http://www.enigmacurry.com/2008/05/09/emacs-as-a-powerful-py...
Well, I guess I'll bookmark it and testdrive it once it's back.

Thanks! :D
It's interesting that Google chose to build this out on their own instead of acquiring Loopt (or someone else). Was Loopt even open to an acquisition?
I agree that everyone was probably aware that speed is important, but I always thought that as long as pages loaded in less than 1 or 2 seconds, then it wouldn't make much of a difference to most users. This post changes my point of view; I think I'm going to work harder to reduce page load times as much as possible instead of stopping at something that "seems fast"
And that book is Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Best-Practice-Patterns-Kent/...). Not anything like the design patterns book in case anyone wonders, and it's a good read even if you don't do Smalltalk.
As children, we know that walking has inherent value. Edison learned many different ways to not make a light bulb, but he knew that it was a great feat if he could just get it right.

My struggle sometimes seems to be knowing what direction to start going in, no matter how many times I fall or filaments I vaporize.

I certainly know several ways to make a web site that no one will visit. :-)
I can understand this. Walmart is the most painful website to browse on the internet, because you go on usually looking for something or the price of something and it takes what feels like an eternity to get anywhere.
How to Hack Roadsigns
rewriteUnitTestsThatNoLongerMakeSense

Delete em. You should be iterating your unit tests.

Over time you will find some really useful unit tests for common mistakes, and others that are basically useless. Try and approach things from the perspective of what you would like to know works and not just tossing everything and the kitchen sink at the problem. When you find a bug add a unit test just in case it comes back, if you change major parts of the system, port the most useful unit tests and delete the rest.

I think of unit tests as saving you from the (I thought I just fixed this) problem.

PS: The major advantage of this approach is you keep adding more tests to the older parts of the system, which are also the most costly to change because other parts of the system assume it works. And assumptions you and your code is making can be really hard bugs to find and fix.
Ah, looks like I misunderstood the name "Rooms" I was under the impression it was some sort of discussion forum and thus didn't even followed that link.
Will check if it's that's what I need, thanks!
I heard Google also found that increasing speed increased users' perception of the quality of the search results. The reason was that when the site was faster, users did more searches. Naturally they found more stuff. But they attributed the gain to Google's cleverness rather than the extra work they'd done themselves.
Couldn't one come to another conclusion here? In fact several other conclusions. For one, since users were getting more results on the page they didn't need to go to a second results page, thus causing the drop-off in traffic.

If you're going to come to some grand "Aha!" moment, you should define your experiment. Were these the same users? on the same day? searching for the same stuff? What browsers were they using? Did they have their windows maximized? What was their screen size? ... and so on.
Dear HN, I'm worried about us
I ran a little experiment... in a popular story, I said basically the same thing three ways:

Angry sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465422 (current score: -5)

Definition of my scope of knowledge, followed by the same opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465428 (current score: -4)

One-sentence witty sarcasm: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465436 (current score: 9)

Now, I really value our relationship, and it's meant to me more than any other coder/news-community relationship I could have imagined, but this isn't the Hacker News I feel in love with.

We all know "karma doesn't matter", but it definitely shapes the discussion that takes place. So let's reiterate some social guidelines which always helped this relationship flourish. I'll start:

- don't downvote things you disagree with, only things which are egregiously offtopic or seriously detract from the conversation
I use Terminal-based Emacs exclusively. Couldn't stand all the "distractions" (bells and whistles) of Aquamacs. But, more importantly, with this mode I can use Emacs everywhere, including my servers over ssh, with exactly the same setup.

I bind Option to Meta in Terminal.app and that works very well.
To "Which comes first, the product or the marketing?"

I answer: Yes.
It's interesting how this "little" detail always seems to get overlooked by the XP zealots. A great book which I think everyone should read before jumping onto the XP/TDD/Scrum/Agile/etc bandwagon is called "Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP". It highlights the failed C3 project and offers some compelling arguments.
> posted 23 hours ago

Doh!
Matlab is good at prototyping what one might actually build in another language. Its basically a regular python like language that has lots of built-ins for doing stuff with vectors and matrices and plotting things nicely.

Mathematica on the other hand is more of a tool for doing things symbolically (x's & y's). You can integrate, differentiate, find roots, etc all symbolically. It does have tools for doing numerical integrations and such, but they are much more of a black box than matlab's and are very hard to port out of mathematica. Some math folks don't like mathematica because of its black-box attitude, which is understandable. I use it sometimes for calculus.

Don't do linear algebra with mathematica. Matlab is waaay better at it.
Models vs. Modules
Maybe PG should try this in kicking his HN habit, introduce throttling features that will increase the time taken to render HN rather than focusing on optimizations, I know it would help a lot of other folks as well ;-)
Thanks, that indeed seems to be what I need - except that I couldn't quite understand whether the people I want to share with also have to register at koollage.com or they could simply subscribe to a RSS feed.

And then, it's of course a bit risky to use that service when it might be shut down any moment.
I’ve never seen Kent Beck as a crazy rules person. I think his comment from stackoverflow demonstrates this:

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don't typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don't test for it. I do tend to make sense of test errors, so I'm extra careful when I have logic with complicated conditionals. When coding on a team, I modify my strategy to carefully test code that we, collectively, tend to get wrong.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/153234/how-deep-are-your-...
Yeah, this software isn't that exciting; it looks like rdesktop with a few added features.
I wouldn't write off unit testing and test-driven development so quickly. My personal experience is that sometimes it felt like a waste of time, and when it was, I dropped it. For times when I had a clue of what I wanted to do, but only just a clue, writing the test first was a nice tool for fleshing out behavior.
The magnitudes of the scores seem different than they might have a year ago, but the directions don't.
i tend to agree, and i follow the mantra of only dishing out karma for things that are either particularly helpful/insightful/interesting, and only downvoting things that are actually detracting from the topic at hand.

everything else is neutral, which would, to me, include something that i don't agree with but doesn't actually detract from anything.
It's an unsubstantiated attack on patterns, software engineering, and licensing by Xah Lee, who used to pollute slashdot IIRC. He has nothing of interest to say.
Thanks for posting this Ardell. He's absolutely right about costs going down in a recession. I just didn't notice them till I did this interview. I was too busy worrying about losing revenue.
is the any studies done you can point out, or is it just personal anecdotal evidence?
Yeah - I think though that the $25,000 pricetag is outlandish. It should be free. The benefit to society will be realized in the connections that result from brining together these 'minds' rather than from whatever topic they will or won't learn while there.

I think its a good step though - to actively foster innovation rather than assume academia (which I guess this is, though non-standard - which is good) business or war will generate it.
Ah, cool, will check it out later!
groupthink is an inherent problem with sites like this...nothing you can do about it.
I have spoken to tons of folks on websites they think are fast, websites they would benchmark against -- in the majority of cases perception of fast loading website triumphs an apples-to-apples comparison of time taken to download & render a page. Perception plays a huge role when it comes to wining the mind games in the users head regd. page download times.
Totally forgot identi.ca!
Will probably be one of the things to consider when deciding for a final solution!

Thanks!
If long fixed-width lines are causing you problems, see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=437002
Another well-illustrated example of the fact that users don't know what they want, you have to A/B Test it out of them.
Are office politics hurting your organization?