skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like C, and I love Python. Python programmers already found a good solution to this conflict, rewrite slow code in C, write the rest in Python. And they do this not because they are not macho enough to write it all in C, but because that way they can have all the advantages of fast code and useful abstractions. C is just as useful as Python, just not for the same things.
Honda Insight Hybrid challenges Toyota Prius
Honda is now challenging Toyota's hybrid crown with its new hybrid car Honda Insight. Honda Insight is already in top 10 selling cars in Japan.
Hi, sorry for not getting into more details about us. Our startup is developing a social network aggregator for the iPhone and Android. We allow our users to search across social networks and keep track of conversations within their social graphs. We are in closed beta at the moment and about to release in the next couple of weeks. This is why I would like to meet as many interesting people as possible. I thought that YC would be a good start. Bastian
Rick Rocketson on the iphone is a traditional platformer like that, it would be nice to have Mario but it still gives you that old school gameboy feel, with a similar control structure.
Startup scene in london is very good. I will reply with more details but sadly have to board my plane to SF now.
"if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast."

I would turn that around. The luck factor in Fluxx is staggeringly high. However, what makes Fluxx fun is that it does not make any attempt whatsoever to hide that fact.

My problem with SoC is that it has a very high luck factor, but that the game also tries very hard to hide that fact.
The expansion Cities and Knights or using a deck of cards with the dicerolls make SoC bearable.
What is new and exciting in PHP 5.3?
When I saw this story on front-page I actually thought it must be the Simon Johnson one; strange how similar the two stories are.
I can seriously recommend Agricola. It features a very novel gameplay concept, and to make it even better, they have different sets of cards to adjust the games difficulty level. I've played Agricola about 10 times or so now, but I'm eager to play it more often. And there's not a lot of games that can do that.

PS. Hi from Netherlands ;)
I actually think people on HN will enjoy it, because it takes a rather emotional topic and breaks it down into what are the primary reasons he has seen for marriages failing in what, I assume is, his professional opinion.

I think people like me enjoy hard problems, finding out the root cause, and determining a solution. From that perspective, I thoroughly enjoyed this article as it presented some salient causes for a fairly difficult problem (keeping a marriage/relationship going).

It wasn't full of platitude and suggestions to "date once a week" etc - it was a solid breakdown of causes. Coupled with the recent discussion of the bachelor paradox, I really enjoyed the diversion.
"make a new post."

Or perhaps a new site for just 'hacker news' without the rest ;)

Flagging only works if the moderators + pg agree it's off topic (Enough people flagged the Marriage article and it was killed, but then was apparently brought back to life anyway) :/

Appealing to the community to stop upvoting non hacker news and checking the [new] articles for more relevant articles seems like it may have more effect on keeping the magic alive here.

If the community decide they want to read the same sort of articles you find on the front page of Reddit/Digg etc, then so be it, but I personally think it'd be a shame. There's plenty of interesting hacker stories in the [new] section that aren't getting on the front page.
google seem to do a lot better

http://images.google.com/images?q=binary%20pictures
There does seem to be about 40% of HN articles also listed on programming.reddit, I guess the 2 communities do overlap...

maybe its time for tag-based filters on HN, and an automated onreddit tag?
And a good Simon Johnson interview by Bill Moyers can be seen here : http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02132009/profile.html
Maybe part of that is the pain of dealing with configure / autoconf / autotools?

Ive seen a lot of C/C++ programmers write their own build utilities/scripts and lose proper deps in the process.

I found cmake a reasonable alternative.. scons apparently is too, although I hesitate because it seems to encourage writing your own python build plugins, which can be too tempting for people who like to tinker.

agreed, make -j works a treat, and presumably will gain more as cores multiply.

Its kind of nice to work in a scripting environment and avoid some of these problems [via sensible defaults]
Game-design lessons from Disneyland
Completely agreed. Go with a universal color like blue. And install awn/metacity by default with a good theme.

I use ubuntu as my primary os and can't stand the default look. It looks like a "toy".
It would be a shame if this product couldn't come to market. It may not challenge the big players, but would fill a nice gap between the "entry level" machines that sell for $15k and the RepRap products that are a little hacky and require serious engineering know how. Could do wonders for engineering training in high schools.
Hmm.. in my case, part of the fun of learning Scheme was that it had an excellent article on how to generate html web pages... and the syntax was nice [like arc and ruby]. Same for arc, but its newer so lacks the many pre-configured libraries.

Haskell is a nice language, its just a matter of time until someone writes a web tutorial like that, than a web framework etc etc.

But Haskell might be a bit more of a mathematically pure / sophisticated language.. you'd need to commit to some study I think to master it - whereas with ruby [or python] you can sort of hack in a php style, and learn nicer things later on.

Ive seen good blog discussions that 'Ruby is a good enough lisp' and it sort of is to a first order.

So don't sweat it, just use ruby or python or scheme.. or Haskell if it resonates with you. They're all so much more enjoyable than Java or C++ :]
Freaky Speeder Rides the Wind to World Record
The real link is this: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/what-is-new-in-php-53-for...
I think you are conflating the IO monad with monads in general. For example a stateful idom like x++ in your foo example could be simulated with a state monad, but that does not have anything to do with IO, and would certainly not require the IO monad as you seem to suggest.

You can encapsulate the use of a state monad so you can indeed return a pure int even if you use a state monad inside the function. It is only the IO monad which (for obvious reasons) cannot be encapsulated. So only the IO monad is "contagious" in the way you describe. This is only a problem for you if you have input and output spread all over your program.
Actually the rule "facts only" would not really work for this as the reviews will necessarily be opinionated. So it would be more like, in the positive review "The chainsaw effect is really cool" and in the negative review someone else would write "The chainsaw effect gets really boring after a while".

As for vandalism, I agree that this could be a huge problem, however Wikipedia has similar problems for contentious topics. I guess whats needed are 1) a passionate community 2) clear rules what is acceptable and what isnt.
More about PHP 5.3:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/opensource/libraryvi...,
Take a look at Opera's history[1]. Screaming "me too" is like Internet Explorer (and Safari) adding tabs and touting it as a feature. There is no "me too" in first. And either way, users are NOT working for Opera ASA. You think Apple's OFFICIAL false claims are just fine and a few Opera users who don't like these false claims make you want to try Opera less?

[1] http://www.opera.com/docs/history/
Thanks for the link, there were some helpful pointers in there. In particular, the WikiDrama model seems a good approximation to what we are trying to do:
http://www.communitywiki.org/de/WikiDrama
Well, I have to say that the comic aspect did not get through to me. If you read your intro:

I recently read this post at readwriteweb called Top 10 Traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer. It got me thinking, those were important traits to be a good programmer, but here some were surefire traits of a bad programmer.

That doesn't read like an intro to a humorous article.

Then, when you go into the points themselves, they're not all that funny. For example, point number 7:

7) Can navigate office politics easily

Unlike their tongue tied good programmer colleagues, many of the bad programmers have skills in various areas not directly related to programming. It is an important skill to cultivate as it helps them keep their job in the first place.

That could have been written in a humorous style, by exaggerating things and making it obvious that you're not making a serious argument. Instead, it feels like you're seriously arguing that having decent social skills is a trait of bad programmers. If you made outrageous claims like "no self-respecting programmer will look in the eyes of, let alone talk to, a colleague," then it would be obvious that you're exaggerating... to me it read like a serious argument, not like a joke.

So from a practical point of view, I didn't find the article useful, and the humour didn't get through to me (and, apparently, to others, since they didn't vote it up). Hopefully this comment helps you with the next one :-)
Link to a link - http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/what-is-new-in-php-53-for...

Now php 5.3 has lambdas, 'pharchives' :] and namespaces plus other goodness...

I wonder why they used a slash as the namespace scope clarifier - why not '::' or just '.' ?

I'm not dissing PHP, Ive used it, its handy, fast sturdy, ubiquitous.. but you feel the syntax works against you.
>3) There is far too much emphasis on 'weddings' as opposed to 'marriages.'

This is a nice article, but when reading this point I wanted to share a different perspective.

A colleague of mine got married recently. The marriage lasted 3 days with unnumerable rituals. It culminated with him and his bride having to sit beside a fire from 4 in the afternoon to about 3 at night while the pundit recited slokas.

It was, as you can imagine, an exhausting experience. I don't think he's in any hurry to get divorced and married again!
Social Media is Going to Disappear
>6) People settle for less than what they want.

Sorry - quick follow up. Many Indians get an "arranged marriage" where you don't really have great expectations. However, many of them go on to form happy, stable, marriages. People want to be happy and husbands and wives tend to grow into each other and find ways to be happy.
Nokia N97 (Unlocked) full touch screen
Nokia is known as a company that gets things right from the first try. In fact, some of the older models are still in demand. It's a safe bet that the N97 will be a touch screen phone that people will want for years to come.
Basically funtional programming helps resolve the problem of bugs. If you rarely make bugs in your code, you probably wont get any advantage from functional languages. They don't allow you to do anything practical which is not possible in OO or imperative languages (and vice versa).

So, how does functional programming reduce bugs? The theory is that we make bugs because programs are too complex to grasp fully (even if we wrote the whole progam ourselves), which makes us make wrong assumptions about what happens in a given piece of code, and how that piece of code will influence other parts of the program.

Functional programming tries to reduce the amount of different "invisible" outside factors which may determine what will happen in a given piece of code. This makes it easier to understand code and avoid mistakes.
4 Ways To Lighten Your Daily Diet
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I recall spending hundreds of dollars a semester on books. I distinctly remember my Organic Chemistry text was well in excess of $100. The cost of a computer amortized over the entire college experience is not a whole lot compared to other costs. For most people, a netbook would be able to get the job done. It might not be ideal, but you could make it work. Even for CS majors, you could just use a netbook and fire up an EC2 small instance if you needed something more powerful. You can get a lot done on EC2 before hitting the price of two slices of pizza and a coke.
Speaking as a guy who was single when he got a Mac, has dated since getting his Mac, and is single once again, the Mac has nothing to do with dating unless you're really desperate and willing to go after would-be hipsters. In fact, dating has no consideration when getting a Mac. You get it because it's a beautiful machine that feels wonderful.

I have a sinking suspicion that the people who are that sensitive to beautiful things get more dates than people who have less taste in things, but the two are not directly correlated.
Thanks for the tip about the technology - the company does not say anything,
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Stuff seems slightly different here (in the UK), at least based on what I've heard from students in the US and absorbed through popular culture (ha).

I didn't have my own laptop most of the time I was an undergrad, and although students these days tend to have them rather than desktops, I don't see that many carrying them around/taking them to lectures/tutorials. Certainly if a student I taught whipped out their laptop I'd be amazed.

I was taught computer science at a fairly 'traditional' institution where we learned from OHPs, Powerpoint and printed notes rather than live code demos that you could type out on your laptop and play with while the lecturer was talking. (I recently went to a tutorial day that was run like this and it was amazing; I'm not necessarily advocating learning to code on paper, but it does help you pass exams where you have to write code on paper..)

Anyway, without computer labs many people out and about on campus wouldn't have e-mail or 'net access, and as others have pointed out it let us run a pretty complex setup for teaching (ML and Java through some insane whacked-out emacs customisation; to this day I use vim as a result of that teaching). I guess the general 'labs as somewhere the general student body goes to write essays aren't needed' applies, but a nice quiet room full of the sound of people typing is a great environment to get work done, and at least at the universities I'm familiar with in the UK, there's not much room for laptops. Plus laptops have distractions on, and lab machines don't.
If you're stuck, you can talk to your neighbor. Maybe they're stuck too.

Maybe they're not and will look at you as if you're a worm that crawled out of a spaceship. Or stare at the floor and not answer your question.

(My experiences asking peers for help in labs haven't been positive. But I love the quietness and ability to work undistracted.)
Would be kind of nice if the "flag" link went to "approved" after a moderator deemed it worthy. That way we wouldn't keep flagging it after we know the mods had already reviewed it for worthiness.
There was a really big argument at the time, the crux of which was that since the PHP parser isn't context aware they had to use a symbol that wasn't used elsewhere. :: is used for static calls, . is used for concatenation.

So the choice ended up being between ::: and the backslash, the backslash being chosen because it is easier to type.
Forgot to mention that there's a weekly hacker meet up in the mission on wednesdays: http://www.archivd.com/open-hacker-house/
This could have quickly been tested by using a memory disk and trying if the compile would go faster when the files are located there.
The topic link is a detour to this article: http://fabien.potencier.org/article/11/what-is-dependency-in...
Can Writing Be Taught? (2004)
This is simply the worst "marriage advice" I've ever read that wasn't trying to be funny. Skip it.
What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it?
Milan 2009: Patricia Urquiola for Moroso
The new designs of Patricia Urquiola for Moroso that will be launched at Milan Design Week this April - I expect that her Fergana collection will be a great success.
The other her new projects - Aden Sofa & Rift Armchair, at least in the way they look as color drawings at the moment - do not impress me.
I just read the fifth child by Doris Lessing, a novel about a family destroyed by a child who is a 'throwback', a kind of neanderthal, or troll. On amazon, there is a comment from a woman who claims to have lived through that, which made me really wonder. Real life trolls?

And now in this article an autist is described as a warty monster from a Grimm fairy tale, and I suddenly understand what this novel is about. I am a little shocked to see an autist portrayed as a troll in a horror story.
What book should I read (linking to Amazon). What song should I listen to (linking to iTunes)..

sounds fair enough - if they can stick to it.

(to clarify - If you are being sponsored/monitized by the retailer and not the manufacturer - then some recommendations would be pretty legit (you'd have incentive to suggest the best song/book)) Remembering though that any attempt to ask "where should I buy my books / music - will then conflict with that relationship with apple/amazon/etc.
We play with all of the player's showing victory points.
That's right in general, but a payment processor cutting off the service without notice or explanation isn't comparable to bad food on a cheapo flight. It's more like offloading passengers during a stopover in Mogadishu.
Just finished reading, I'm speechless.
I can't wait to see more companies getting into the desktop 3D printer space. The RepRap project is still very difficult to a novice user, and has a long way to go. Bre Pettis actually just started a company called http://www.makerbot.com/ MakerBot that is working on a more commercialized RepRap. Definitely something to checkout, since they are shooting for a sub $1000 price point.
From the site after a 0 match result: "TinEye looks for the specific image you uploaded, not the content of the image. TinEye cannot identify people or objects in an image."

So it's not what some of us might have been afraid of.
What is new in PHP 5.3 for PHP amateurs?
Flagged and resubmitted the original here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=536422
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Guys, abcphp.com has no original content. It's a link to a link. Please flag these submissions, don't upvote them.
To summarize the article: yeah, SSDs are faster, but not quite for everything, because if you're CPU bound, SSD won't make your code run faster.

So, why does this get upvoted, again?
Dell 12 Mini Inspiron Reviews Laptop Specifications
The "upmod only" strategy of this site is now getting tested... What that means is that the old guard have no power to enforce social orthodoxy upon any new visitors, so norms like "a site called hacker news should be about hacker news" cannot be enforced, and therefore disappear. Nor do the moderators seem to care to enforce the rules, so...

I would guess that in a year or so, the front page of news.ycombinator.com won't contain even one programming story most of the time. Paul Graham's essay says he thinks there's nothing wrong as of February 2009:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

so I suppose no official action is being taken or contemplated. Unfortunately, the character of a community is a lot easier and faster to destroy than one would think, and can never be restored, and so I suspect that by the time any action might be contemplated, it will already be too late.
I'm just looking at php nowadays and, after having worked with it for many years, have just decided that I want server-side javascript. The new features are nice, but the language itself is still scattered and inconsistent in areas.

There's a lot of interesting work being done at http://groups.google.com/group/serverjs?hl=en and https://wiki.mozilla.org/ServerJS
Would like to add that the other best choice single colon ":" might have been a good candidate too. But PHP 5.3 also introduced the age old goto command, and colon was assigned to for labeling goto targets.
It's easy to imagine EC2 expanding beyond 1U servers and databases to GPGPUs, FGPAs or quantum cores. There's a lot of potential for a gpu cloud - from quick rendering (xtraNormal/nVidia Gelato) to scientific computing (Larrabee?).
In my experience --- and I am from Germany ;) --- The top games at the boardgamegeek are too complex as first games.

Settlers, Bohnanza and Carcassonne are excellent starters into the world of boardgames. Geeks will want to graduate to Caylus, Puerto Rico and the like later on.
The title is a 'hook'. From the article:

By “disappear”, I mean that sooner rather than later, social media as a hyperbole-driven, standalone, new-kid-on-the-block entity is going to evolve into a communications, marketing and sales strategy and distribution vehicle that happens to rely on a variety of valuable and useful online services.

Maybe a "social media will, eventually, merge with the usual stuff" is not as nice as title
Content owners pay a lot of money to protect their content. They pay money to lawyers, lobbyists, and companies like Media Sentry to snoop in on P2P traffic.

It's not a stretch to say they will pay to find stolen images. I'd venture they'd pay pretty well too.
The CEO of Moo.com blogs about the art of business cards
The Quiet Coup or, What the IMF Would Tell the United States, If It Could
Ask HN: Voting down ability gone?
Hey all,
Now don't call me a narcissist, but suddenly my voting down powers are gone, anyone has a clue what's up with that?
My karma is 100+ and today I did two vote-downs(but hey I did several vote-ups too). Is that got anything to do with that?
Interview with the man who built Google's V8 engine from scratch
Maybe once there are add-on controllers (like this: http://www.icontrolpad.com/) which will be made possible with OS 3.0, then these types of games will be playable.

Though what I'm wondering is if a standard for game controllers will emerge or if there will be competing standards with games have varying support for the different controllers that are available. Maybe Apple should define this standard?
The Inglorious Pun: Lowest Form of Wit or Fun for the Loftiest Minds?
If everyone has it, it is perhaps not a disorder :)
Does anyone have any other sources for this information? Like anything that makes it look less like a rumor?