skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not yet, but I am not actually sure what to use from there. There are just so many definitions that have weird up vs. down ratios that I wouldn't dare to let a program decide what is legitimate or not.
your comment gives me some hope that if I were to try to implement this with Drupal, I wouldn't end up in a stinking morass.

Oh, no, Drupal pregenerates the stinking morass for you. ;)

Well, it's not really as bad as that. But the person in this thread who pointed out that Drupal development is the art of compromise was on the money. And the learning curve for Drupal 5 can be rather like scaling a sheer cliff. It all depends on what you're trying to do, though. If you're willing to compromise your goals to fit the scope of things that you can convince Drupal to do right out of the box... it works out of the box!

Get a book or two. The Lullabot.com folks seem to be good teachers. In particular, if you find yourself wanting to write PHP for Drupal, get a copy of Pro Drupal Development and sleep with it under your pillow.

As it happens, my email thing is not public code. But perhaps it could be. I seem to have already identified one potential user! But the stuff I wrote would have to be factored out and turned into a plugin for Organic Groups, or perhaps interfaced with the Actions Module.
The good news is that mercury-free HFCS ingredients exist. Food companies just need a good push to only use those ingredients

The good news is that arsenic-free dogshit exists. Dogs just need a good diet of arsenic-free dog food.
"I've heard that "perfect is the enemy of good enough" many times, but the repressed artist in me refused to accept this as truth" - Thank you!

I still have this issue about perfectionism. I am constantly reading, trying to perfect my knowledge of the framework I am using, CSS guidelines to ensure that the UI is perfect, patterns book and software development books to make sure I know a code smell, always trying to write the perfect code or pick the perfect color that I have NEVER seen a side project to fruition.

This might have to do with what kirse said - it may have to do with the way I look at myself internally. But it certainly proves to be an impediment. The "fail fast, fail early fail often" matra does not work so well for me, especially when I have complete control over the final outcome.

I will certainly find that book and see if it helps me. But its nice to know someone else was in my shoes, and found a way to work with it, rather than fighting it.
Obviously a list like this is never going to please everyone - but how can alan kay have been omitted??
I'm willing to donate the following books to anyone willing to pay the shipping ($4.95 for priority mail, a bit more if you want a confirmation number):

Agile Web Development With Rails: David Heinemeier Hansson (Paperback, 2005)
ISBN-10: 097669400X | ISBN-13: 9780976694007

Rails Recipes: Chad Fowler (Paperback, 2006)
ISBN-10: 0977616606 | ISBN-13: 9780977616602

I'm the original owner of both and they are in perfect shape.
BTW, let me add that by "14 year olds" I mean people who behave like 14 year olds. Actual 14 year olds are welcome here so long as we can't tell.
Visualizing the Rails commit history
It's probably also a cheap/easy way to rack up good feedback for both the buyer and seller. I can think of easier ways, but I suppose this could work too.
I fear you're in for a letdown.
Actually, if you're sufficiently intelligent and open-minded, you're bound to eventually run into religion. Not necessarily in a sense that you'll accept that an Abrahamic God (or some other gods) created the universe, but in a sense that you'll wonder about what it must be like to view the world from that point of view. The real religious thinkers were philosophers a world apart from how many on the internet perceive the religious right.
the new device corrects some of the design flaws of the first model, adding round buttons instead of those strange angular ones, and smaller side buttons to avoid accidental page turns.

I received a Kindle as a gift and at first I hated the buttons. Now having read a dozen books or so, I think they are genius. I am sure they are making this change to satisfy the initial-reaction reviewers.

It can be a little to easy to accidentally press the side buttons on the original, something that happens to me a couple of times per book. This is greatly outweighed by the thought that went into them. It is really easy to press the buttons with an elbow, pillow or even your nose when need be. It makes reading a book a one- or no-hand operation.

Behind the screen, I would put the weird and unique buttons on the kindle as a top feature.
Yes, I agree. That's what I meant by 'Perhaps, the site will get more active over time'.
No. I come here for news and comments, not used stuff. If I had to wade through another Craigslist or eBay I wouldn't bother. It dilutes the franchise,
From the way I read those comments, I gathered that the comments implied that Windows "consumed" two gigs of ram,

I'm afraid I didn't make myself clear before. I also think that commenters were wrong. I just tried to explain why. The article says that's the default arrangement, but if non-kernel memory grows bigger than 2 GB, I assume that it'll be allocated in the virtual space that's unused by kernel.
From what I remember, there was nothing in the article about gay marriage, or the pledge of allegiance. The author wasn't even particularly religious, though he hinted at deist tendencies. He certainly wasn't advocating religion, rather he was discussing the role it played in the lives of its adherents, and what that meant for popular atheist advocacy.

But from the reaction on this thread, he could have been linking to a Jack Chick tract. The anti-intellectualism on display is stunning. It looks to me that a Pavlovian anti-religious response is kicking in and a bunch of folks are spewing worn out canned responses orthogonal to the topic at hand. The reason this topic was dead-ed is surely more due to the juvenile discussion here than the thought-provoking article.

Should we refuse to listen to Christmas carols over the holidays because California passed proposition 8? Ought we boycott history lectures that mention popes because of Catholic stances on birth control?

If we temporarily drop our feelings about how people ought to act and examine how people actually do act, I promise you that we will learn interesting things. What happened to the geek ideal of learning about the world around us?

What happened to the inquiring mind? When I meet people that think different from me, I try to understand what motivates them, why they are different, what their history is like, what their culture is like, and how they see me. That shouldn't be hard for smart people like you and me, and I think it's a valuable thing to do.

The downside is that when you start to understand people, you start to lose enemies, and it is fun to have enemies.

Sadly, there are few places where one can have a good conversation these days. Most of the people who are capable of interesting discussion are old. It seems few young people are learning the art of entertaining ideas without changing their minds. Such a flat society it will be when every conversation must be an occasion for advocacy or agreement.

But maybe I am missing your point and you are just going to restate how gay people are okay and evolution is correct again. How thrilling.
Put down the abstract factory and get something done
EFF to White House: What Will You Do to Protect the Privacy of WhiteHouse.gov Users?
Fred is probably underestimating the number of jobs created by companies he funded. Companies always also create jobs in peripheral industries-- in their suppliers, for example, and in industries that use whatever tools they're building. The latter was particularly obvious to us at Viaweb. Lots of people based businesses on our software.
The only way to really get your money's worth is to fail yourself.
This is a good start, and very appreciated. I have found that asp.net is very rough on the brain when you are used to RoR and Django. Any thoughts on that?
About CheatNeutral
Now if only we can figure out a way to make Spain travel at 88 miles per hour...
It's certainly hard for me to know without reading more history. The most common job to compare it to would have to be farming, which was a hard life with different risks and rewards.
I know this thread is not highly looked upon, but I have been trying to sell a new Rev A Macbook Air + Superdrive and case for 1400 obo. email in my sig.
The general idea is worthwhile, but not to the extreme the author suggests:

> Maintainability isn't a factor. Best practices don't
> matter. Design patterns don't matter. All that matters
> is getting things done.

Naturally, you must find a happy medium. Go for maintainability and best practices wherever possible, but don't lose sight of your goal: create your product.

That said, the author did acknowledge the need for moderation toward the end. Best practices are thusly named for a reason.
Well, any language that becomes popular is going to have its share of crappy code being written. I'd much rather see newbie programmers get their start with a cleaner language like Lua than PHP, maybe it might help them learn better from the beginning.
Political (not policy) cheer leading is an excellent indicator that someone can't think.

Hopefully, as long as we keep HN free of politics we'll avoid redditization.
I really don't understand. At home I've got an Asus F6V. At work it's Asus G50V. Both with Vista/Kubuntu dual boot. I really don't know what's happening with 32/64 bits here. Both use 32 bits OSs but G50V (64 bit machine) has 4GB, so it seems it isn't OS the piece that decides memory addressing capabilities :-)
me too, and yep likely people out there with loads more experience then me, but it would be an awesome gig and seemingly a quicker path to those "million of dollars" he is missing out on.
Companies as persons
It’s no news that there have been a lot of layoffs in the IT industry lately. And there are more to come, I expect, because layoffs are supposed to have a positive economic impact for the company (which is higly desired in stormy economic times). But layoffs also come with a big price tag: they leave behing a cloud of doubt, lack of trust and uncertainty over the remaining employees.
The best book I know of on that transition is E. W. Bovill's English Country Life, 1780-1830.

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=bovill&...

Incidentally, his Golden Trade of the Moors is one of the best history books I've ever read.
You can't inflate one number that way one without doing the same for the other. I suspect there are more peripheral jobs created per startup-job than are destroyed per manufacturing-layoff, though.
> This helps prevent pointer bugs, though not as effectively as avoiding C in the first place.

I hate to sound like the average Reddit poster and write something like "quoted for truth", but... quoted for truth.
CPUs prior to 386 had direct access to physical memory. From 386 on, you could enable protected mode (default for Linux and Windows 95+) in which a pointer doesn't point to a physical location but to a virtual address that system translates to physical memory or disk-cached memory. That's the most basic fact. With much luck, that's the only thing you need to know to understand it :-)
I worked on these. The phone's price is subsidized into the card pricing, so they would loose money if you could do that. They had us design them that there could be no swapping (they are locked to the pay-as-you-go sims). Unlocking requires both software and hardware modifications - at least the phones we made.
I've experienced a bit of muslim culture first-hand and it's not even close to the cutesy image you get from this article. The author sees herself as a culturally sensitive critical thinker ("before you think I drank the koolaid...") but she is far from it. Take her cliched argument about the advantages of abbaya. If completely covering one's face and body is so desirable, why are women, and only women, forced into it under the threat of extreme corporal punishment and imprisonment? And how could she miss the fact that not speaking unless spoken to and making sure to always look down (to name just a couple things) is an integral part of wearing the garment?

Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. Extolling the virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that working cotton fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air and exercise. Ignorant at best.
If someone would suggest a service with an open marketplace and group instances, we could probably go there. Or we could just make one.
will ruby and python get the same treatment? if not, why not?

edit: ty.
Facebook begins testing ad-driven polls
For the record, I was 15 when I started reading Slashdot.

It's easy to say that the ideas and hackerdom I found there significantly changed the course of my life.

Here's to today's 14- and 15-year olds!
Ask HN: PhD, Startup, or Career? 
I'm nearing the end of my undergraduate Computer Science degree and I've been presented with the opportunity to read/study for a PhD fully funded by my University. The trouble is, I also hold job offers with two of the most prominent software vendors in the world. I'm at a cross roads as to which route to take at this point.

To add further confusion to my life, I've also been given a great idea for a startup and have the chance of working with a really cool co-founder. I really don't know which way to go with this one, any ideas?

I'll give a short description of the startup just in case you are wondering. My friend did a year long industrial work placement at a finance company while at University. He worked in the anti money laundering division. While he was there he had to use some god awful enterprise software that made use of some pretty bad pattern matching algorithms. Basically, he wants to do a startup with me where we would develop a SaaS based application to do pattern matching against bank transaction records to spot fraud, this is a big market with a few well established players. There is no doubt that we can make better software with better pattern matching algorithms, our problem is getting clients (same with everything I guess).
The software is commonly refered to as AML software in case you wanted to do a small amount of background reading on it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-money_laundering_software)
No matter how you experience it, perfectionism always traces back to a lack of internal self-acceptance.

Not everything that sounds Deeply Wise is actually true.

Try doing math with imperfect proofs and see how long it takes to arrive at a contradiction. Ariane 5 blew up thanks to a floating-point error.

Some things in life require perfection. The error lies in applying the same standard to things that don't.
The Realtime Real Estate Crisis (screen space)
What do you mean by "go nuts"?
The cheap $10 phones are locked to only operate with specific networks.
"you're just referring them because you get a cut"

Do you think this would be different if the people were required to have a subscription themselves in order to become an affiliate? I think this is a good way to go. Is it enough to curb everyone's skepticism? Probably not.
I agree, ASP.Net bends over backwards to give a winforms-like experience (which invariably it doesn't). Some features (databinding?) seem to have been incorporated just to enable drag'n drop visual development, which is only really useful when recording screencasts and giving demos.

Just go with MS MVC if you like RoR.
People generally don't eat sushi in the US as often as they consume high fructose corn syrup containing food products.
i'd suggest you sit down and take stock of what you need, first. if your situation requires you to follow a specific path, do that.

after that, figure out what you want, and follow that. you have time and little obligations (i'm assuming), so even if following what you want to do leads to a dead end, you have time and flexibility to get past that that you won't later in life.
startup would be best, but most risky. job will be good if they let you innovate and reward you for it. phd is good if you like to be tortured.
if you're interested in the security aspects of this stuff, there are a number of presentations by openbsd developers on the openbsd site (http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/):

http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/nycbsdcon08-pie/

http://openbsd.rt.fm/papers/ven05-deraadt/index.html
My opinion: The online documentation. It takes a while to sort through it, but it really is a great resource as are the reader-submitted comments at the end of each page.
I've noticed that python seems to stay cleaner than php would, but I'm not sure if it's the framework that's keeping things neat or the fact that php made it easier for the code to get dirty. It's also easy clean up a few parts of python without effecting too much where php might need a rewrite.
GCC, Now 25 Years Old, Will Add Plug-in Framework
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Stallman's first work on what became GCC. The FSF and GCC announced today that the compiler collection will soon have a framework to allow plug-ins!
Open source .net cms launches RC3
One of the most popular .net open source projects out there Umbraco, launches Version 4, RC3 with a ton of improvements.
Eureka-Real science breaks into TV shows
NPR iPhone app : Live streaming, podcast archive access, keyword search
MIT Enterprise Forum Coming to DFW
I have a Nokia s60 I could send you, but I think the keypad doesn't work. It's fine though if you have people call you and then use the menu to look them up.
I can comment on this. My wife is on tmobile and my father is on ATT, both are using prepaid phones with swapped SIM cards. I know the Virgin mobile phones don't use SIMs (to my knowledge) as well as Tracphone, so those are useless.
Apple threatens Palm chomp • The Register
The (Ironic) Best Way to Make the Bailout Transparent | Freedom to Tinker
Not aware of any book that specifically addresses the move from Ruby to PHP, but you may find the reverse helpful: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ndphpr/rails-for-php-develope...

Of course there's plenty of PHP-specific books. I found one by Wrox to be very helpful: Professional PHP Programming.

PHP syntax is similar to Perl (and/or C) where blocks are delimited by curly brackets, statements by semi-colons and object to method (or attribute) is referenced by two characters vs. Ruby's dot. So in essence, you'll be using that Shift key a lot more.
Yet another reason why I'm glad I'm allergic to corn. Yet another reason to be fed up with the Corn Cartel's push to have everything under the sun made from corn.
certainly true, though you must temper that with the fact that HFCS forms a very small fraction of the volume of a drink/snack, serving to dilute the potential mercury to an extraordinarily small amount per drink/snack.
Agreed.

Another thing the author does not mention is that many of these things you can make very habitual and even into zero cost macros (especially if using a mature IDE).

A habitual extra 15 seconds spent minding something that requires no 'real thought' because you do it all the time can have an enormous long-term organizational impact.
I agree with spoiledtechie that C# is a nice programming language. Recent versions enable very concise higher-order functional (=fun) code to be written. The generics implementation has few warts and tooling is good.

Another gem is SQL Server, even the Express version is fast and has solid backup-restore features.

Powershell provides a (still somewhat embryonic) scripting environment.

One nuisance is the relative dearth of free-free software. The thinking seems to go, that because MS gets money, then so should developers of small utils and such. It gives the entire ecosystem a slightly different feel, and you often find yourself paying $10 or similar for small, almost-trivial add-ons, that would have been free on other platforms where a tradition of sharing for the good of all is the norm (codeplex -- I think -- have helped in this regard).
I'd say do the startup. It'll be the one you'll most regret not doing. Whether you fail or succeed, you'll be ten times more able to tackle whatever you choose to do after.
There are few times better in your life to start a company than in or right after college. Obviously you have made a positive impression on your uni and future employers, so work in the future wout be that hard to get.

I would say go for the startup idea since you see a need that could be better filled.
I always loved Flashblock for Firefox not so much to save bandwidth/CPU, but to make sure that wherever I go, jackasses can't spam me with retarded videos and annoying background music.
Websense Acquires Spam Blocker Defensio
He is a bit over the top. Use best practices, but dont create an interface for only one class dont create an abstract class for only one subclass, dont create a data only class where a HashMap will work. All this extra code has to be maintained by someone. In fact the essence of maintainability is to have less code.
Since the experiment started with overweight people, I can't see it distinguished between losing weight to improve memory and reducing calories to improve memory.
I came from a PHP and Coldfusion background and jumped into VB.NET/ASP.NET development after some brief self training through our company training portal. Basically, they gave me a copy of VS2008 and said okay, "We have this project that is behind and we need help, do you think you can handle it?"

I had a 2 day training on the internal corporate framework and then I was unleashed on the codebase. I would say it took maybe a month for me to 'get it' but after that it was just a matter of code reviews and common sense.

If you can write good code in one language, you should be able to translate it over. That said, the event model is a bit different than the straight scripting in PHP or legacy CF. Once you get used to it you're going to feel spoiled. In the WebForms model, a lot is already done for you. Templates are built in, grids are built in, paging is built in... It can almost be annoying how much is built in, but then you realize how little time it takes to get things done. You have more time to spend on real business logic, which is a good thing.

I would recommend checking out ASP.NET MVC RC1 if you're coming from Rails and Django. Less is built in, but it better suits the design patterns you've come from. The languages are the same, so if you learn WebForms first it doesn't matter: VB and C# are standalone. Once you learn them, you can use them anywhere whether its the web, GUI apps, or console batch code.
Ask HN:  What's a Good Professional Font You Use?
I'm putting my resume together... any suggestions?
you live only once, do the scariest/craziest thing
Higher education needs a national computing cloud |Cloud Computing | whurley | InfoWorld
Just one point about the phd, I noticed that some students who stayed at the same uni for postgrad grew REALLY bored with the place after being there countless years.
You said "polygamy", don't you mean polygyny?
Will EDoS be the next DDOS?
Good thought–we were planning on doing this anyway ... mainly because we would just build their referral stats into the app somewhere.
I can't tell if this is a joke or serious.

Either way, what you're saying here is that someone who does a math problem the right way is a perfectionist.

That's correct in one sense of the word, however, under this specific context where we are discussing "perfectionism", doing a math problem the right way does not make one a "perfectionist".