skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Appliance Repair Man Katy 
The Appliance Man take pride in our appliance repair work and always perform it to the best of our ability. All work performed is guaranteed to be quality work at the most reasonable price possible.
How to turn your iPhone into a 2FA security token
The Eight Levels of Programmers
1) The Feds would require Telecoms to implement systems to shutdown portions of "Teh Nets". You don't need to shut down web/email/etc servers you just need to update the config files in a few backbone devices (routers/etc).

You could shut the internet traffic down in my state fairly easily. Most cities are served by a very few providers and all those providers rely on the underlying carries (ATT/Qwest/etc) to get data moved interstate.
> I would like a language that is good for everything.

And how about a pony while you are at it?;-) No language does everything, what you want to aim for is one that does as broad a range of things as possible:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/03/26/scalable-programming-l...

I think Ruby is 'pretty good' in those terms. Better than Java, IMO, because it lets me do small/quick things easily, something I've always found unpleasant in Java.
It varies naturally per application. When I was doing a little prototyping before deciding to write the core of our ranking algorithm in C++ I took the tightest inner loop and compared C++, Java, Python, Ruby and Perl. For floating point numerics and lots of list traversal the results were:

- C++ | baseline
- Java | 2.5x baseline
- Perl | 4.5x baseline
- Python | 6x baseline
- Ruby | 14x baseline

As a result, we're using C++ where it really matters, Java where it kind of matters and Ruby where it doesn't. This was more than a year ago though, so any performance gains since then naturally aren't included.
Yeah let's get to the point where it's technically possible to build one. This is exactly like preminent scientists in 1903 publishing papers about how powered flight was impossible.
When a work is posted online, it makes possible both harmful and harmless copying.

In other words, people can use it for good or bad.

That's no reason not to post it. No one should use it for bad. If they do, they are responsible.
I remember his hashmap when he published it, state machines are a great way to do concurrency.

The Erlang way of handling concurrency is to spawn millions of "processes" (threads) obviously these can't be hardware threads so Erlang is hitting problems OS schedulers would handle (or not be able to handle) in the JVM's case.

I would argue that the JVM is eventually going to have to handle the threading itself if it's to support any actor based programming. OS schedulers have other uses they need to be fast for and hardware threads will always have higher overhead. Python's Stackless is perhaps an example of the amount of work it would require.
Just a heads up, Gray's Anatomy doesn't only mean the TV show. It also refers to a well regarded human anatomy textbook, "Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body" - see http://www.amazon.com/Grays-Anatomy-Human-Body-30th/dp/08121...
"in smalltalk, methods with the same name don't exist. every method on a object has an unique selector."

Also true of Objective C (as many of you might already know).
Submitted on 12 May 2005 (v1), last revised 11 Jun 2005 (this version, v2)
I thought they were going to actually find the people not just explain affiliate marketing on the internet.

Interesting if you don't know how this works, I guess.
I remember trying this editor out when I was looking for something good on Windows before I switched to using Vim. It was well thought-out; very TextMate-like.

How does this not completely kill their business? Are they really expecting everyone to pay? Or is there only partial openness to the source?

edit: Just saw eli's comment that the core is in fact closed.
I don't see how "the law needs to be enforceable" can be an anti-torrent position. Shutting down torrent sites isn't working out so well. They just provide information, like Google. The actual people doing file transfers are the ones who ought to be in trouble, but that's even less enforceable.
This just in: Quantum mechanics and relativity don't get along.

Film at 11

<<yawn>>
That's why I brought up the 404 page. That's implicitly user initiated. You could also have a button that says "help!"
Yamaha recalls off-road vehicle after deaths
Yamaha Motor Corp., USA recalled about 145,000 off-highway recreational vehicles for repairs Tuesday after three models were involved in 46 deaths. The two-passenger vehicles are designed for drivers over 16 years old with valid drivers licenses, although some reported deaths involved younger children who were passengers or who operated the vehicles against recommendations, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which announced the recall.
Yeah, that's all I did too :)
ruby 1.8 is slower than python, but ruby 1.9 should be on par with it.
http://chirrup.angryamoeba.co.uk/

Angryamoeba has been doing this for months now :)

Although unfortunately this was prior to the OAuth api being released. People are using it though, and an OAuth version is in the works.

Of course the other nice thing about Chirrup, is that you don't have to use Posterous to get this capability. :D
Can Large Companies Help Small Companies Find Business Models?
Gang of villagers chase away Google car
The point of this proposed bill is to retroactively legalize the unlawful wiretapping that had been going on. It legalizes the things we know about, as well as the things that the media hasn't told us about yet. And I phrase it that way because they knew about the NSA taps and hushed them up for more than a year.
Mass Extinctions, Ancient Viruses May Hold Clues to Life’s Origins
Is this a change in policy?

I thought we had to police the internet to stop child porn on months with an 'R' in them and to stop terrorism in months without an 'R'?
So, previously, if you applied an impossible amount of impossibly-stable negative mass in an impossible configuration that was impossible to maintain due to impossible-to-predict interactions with the interstellar medium and goosed it in an impossible manner you might have been able to move faster than light.

Now some guys have revealed that it's also impossible due to quantum effects. Frankly, that's just one more "impossible" in a rich sea of impossible assumptions to make this style of warp drive work.

As I like to say, once you accept one impossibility into your theory, the fact that impossible results occur is not fundamentally interesting.

People who babble about how people thought that traveling faster than sound was impossible and who are we to say this is actually impossible need to spend more time with real relativity and not Star Trek "wishing is an acceptable substitute for engineering" relativity. People who think that the Alcubierre drive was ever actually possible betray a profound misunderstanding of both the drive and relativity, in their zeal to get to the results they want instead of the reality they have. If FTL is possible, it won't be as a result of QM or relativity. It might come from the eventual fusion, but a deeper understanding of relativity shows that you're still facing a steep uphill battle.

The thing that you come to understand if you actually understand relativity is that it is not merely that FTL travel is "impossible" because c is some "cosmic speed limit". c is not the cosmic speed limit. c is the number that indicates the relationship between space and time in the Minkowsky metric. c comes from the literal shape of the universe, which is not the Euclidean one you think it is. Travelling "faster than c" is not merely breaking the 55mph speed limit on your local road, it is fundamentally a undefined, gibberish statement in relativity. Everything outside of your lightcone is profoundly indistinguishable from anything else outside of your lightcone.

The deepest discussion of relativity I know of that is freely online: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm
Big in Japan.
While there may be a couple decisions that may be put on hold until this IBM / Sun thing is completed, I don't think the fundamental reasons behind choosing Java or .NET will change.

Java will still have the community, open libraries, and developer availability that will ensure it's viability in the market. IBM contributes to many great open source projects (Eclipse, Dojo foundation) because they understand the importance of a community of developers that don't pay license fees directly to them.
You might want to take a look at e.g., Scala and how it implements actors on the JVM.

It's basically doing a MxN actor to thread-pool scheduling.
Apple hints at launch of Nehalem-based Xserve
Angels Keep Our Economic Future Alive
This isn't a complete solution but does handle a lot of cases that non-FP developers will write.

Alas, even though there is TCO in MLVM, it doesn't look like that will get through the JCP in time to get into Java v7. :-(
Ersatz Capitalism: Another Nobel Winner Against Bailouts
Ok, that was painful to read by moments.

"Ruby is probably the most powerful programming language on the planet for creating DSLs, or domain specific languages."

If Ruby has anything over Lisp in the DSL domain (besides popularity), I'd love to know.

"A web development platform as powerful and syntactically concise as Rails could only have been done in Ruby."

Idem.

"This power does not come without a price. Ruby is slow. Ruby is generally recognized as being twice as slow as Python, and at least an order of magnitude slower than C++ or Java. Charles Nutter, one of the creators of the JRuby VM for the Ruby language, recently posted an article about optimizations that could be made to the VM, and he improves Ruby performance by as much as twenty times by removing much of Ruby’s power and breaking compatibility. If anything, it shows us skeptics that there is no such thing as a free lunch."

Lisp has all (?) the crazy features you love so much about Ruby and more, yet it's very fast (try SBCL, it compiles to native x86).
No namespaces in Lisp
What are your thoughts on no namespaces in Lisp? Most languages that I like and use have packages, and I feel that helps organize the code. Does lisp have something like that? It doesn't appear that it does, how do you deal with that?
Ask HN: Should monetization be an afterthought ?
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been toying with a startup idea.

My concern is this:

Should monetization be an afterthought ? With the current economic market, its evident that an ad-based biz model only might not be sustainable.
But the moment that I try to dissect my idea from a monetization perspective, I cant come up with anything. That makes me rethink, revisit and re-evaluate my idea.

In fact, when I start analyzing most of my ideas from the perspective of 'make something people will buy' (credit-Sachin Rekhi), it invalidates pretty much all of them.

Do you think I should worry about monetization later ? Build a community / user base and the money will follow ? Or am I just over-analyzing stuff ?
If you want a VM that's totally geared towards "dynamic languages" you should definitely check out Parrot ( http://www.parrot.org/ ).
This power does not come without a price. Ruby is slow.

ARRRRGH! Why do the expectations of guys from the 80s and early 90s still rule us? There are Lisp and Smalltalk VMs out there that are something like 70X as fast as Ruby 1.8! If you add Traits (library for Mixins) to Smalltalk, it is equivalent to Ruby in power. (1)

The one of the biggest misconceptions we have to face in the Computer programming and related professions, is that programmers are on the forefront of technology. Actually, culture lags technology. And in that, I specifically include the culture of computer programmers.

The foundations of OO languages like Ruby and Python were set forth in the 70s and 80s. WYSYWIG word processing, ethernet LANs, desktop publishing existed then in pretty much their current forms at Xerox PARC, only slower. The concepts embodied in Dot-NET and Microsoft's Singularity were bandied about in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The sad thing about our profession is, is that to learn what's coming next, and what's possible you still have to do some digging into history. Things have improved, but because programming is also a cultural artifact, it lags technology like any other cultural artifact.

I keep posting this. I used to wonder why it seemed like tilting at windmills. After writing this post, I now realize why.

Alan Kay: "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521

(1) - In fact, it is homomorphically equivalent. This is precisely why something like Maglev can work. Another interesting thing -- many Lisps are also homomorphically equivalent to at least 90% of the languages out there. And one could probably take just about any Lisp and give it the power of the other 10% (like Erlang) with moderate effort.
This is something like standing on Pluto and saying you don't see what's so bright about the sun. Why not come stand on the surface of the sun and then make up your own mind?

Hawking radiation is not intrinsically weak. Hawking radiation as generated by a large blackhole is weak. Flashlights are not weak; flashlights as powered by my nearly dead batteries are weak.

With a different spacetime configuration you can get arbitrarily strong Hawking radiation, just like you can get arbitrarily strong light using more power. Hawking radiation around a very small black hole tears it apart relatively quickly.

The Universe does not seem to like playing games like this and it tends to wipe out any structure that permits causality violation (as any FTL drive would) in an unsurvivable blaze of either Hawking-radiation or in an explosion of the vacuum energy (see Hawking's work on what would happen if you towed a wormhole around enough at relativistic speeds to cause a causality violation).

And by "unsurvivable", I don't mean "probably fatal to life but we might be able to engineer around it". I mean, "unsurvivable to the space-time structure in question"; whatever mass or energy happens to get in the way is orders of magnitude away from even affecting the outcome, let alone standing a chance of survival.
I think a decent counterexample is Apple's 'Address Book.' To go down his list of complaints:

-Accepts Multiple vCards at once (and export vCards)

-Local copy (also syncs to iPods and iPhones), LDAP syncing, and 'cloud' copies for MobileMe customers (anyone can 'subscribe' to public contact lists)

-No hierarchy--there's a main database, and separate 'groups' that are similar to iTunes playlists (i.e. contacts not exclusive)

-Smart groups for even better control (rule-based groups)

-Good UI (obviously subjective)

The only thing that Address Book doesn't have is a "Visual Directory", although personally I don't see the need for it (the idea seems akin to tag clouds to me--it sounds cool in theory, but it's implementation would probably be more flashy than functional).

I'm not saying Address Book is the end-all and be-all of contact management, but it seems to satisfy all of his complaints.
I want to be a dead programmer.

No, that doesn't sound as cool as I expected.
Oh, sorry!
Dear Europe, How Would You Feel About Google Buying Twitter?
We're rich! We have special exemption from the law and can stop you creating a useful public resource!

I'm embarrassed by my countrymen. They do not speak for me.
Also, family handling completely sucks. If you have both a husband and his wife in your contacts and they move, you have to change both their contact details. Even worse when you decide you want to keep track of the birthdays of their three kids. This really needs to be refactored out to a family group with persons in it (who have individual details like birthdays and mobile phone numbers).

And then there is this whole American centeredness in contact management. My girlfriend has two first names, while a friend of mine has two last names. Neither fits the American model of "first name middle name last name". Shortening the second part of their name to an initial would be completely wrong.

But hey, it can never be worse than Evolution (an open source Outlook clone). Evolution had the interesting property of not being able to handle birthdates before 1970 properly. Cause, you know, who would know anyone born before 1970...
Well, while the picture itself is pretty boring and I don't find it very useful or interesting (sorry), I really like the way it is drawn, and I would love to see a real transit map drawn like this, any hints how to do this easily? :)
Linux game console ready to ship
And now burglars know of a great place where people are so well-appointed that they don't want the burglars to know. One often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it.
Brits are completely ok with government surveillance but once The Google takes some pictures, it gets real!
Probably (Not a lawyer, etc) legal. There's versions of XChat for Windows that are built from the source and have no differences besides the licensing code stripped out of it.
I really liked this article, and remember reading the original article and thinking that it does a good job of explaining an engineering approach that invariably needs the ability to skillfully use many technologies.
Tell HN NY: Moving meetup tonight to Heartland Brewery, Union Square (6-8PM), RSVP here
Due to the weather, we're moving tonight's meetup indoors to a place that can fit the 55+ RSVPs thus far on Anyvite.

Thanks and see you tonight!
Um, no.

Even discounting specialized hardware+VM solutions like Azul, the regular JVM runs fine on shipping hardware that has lots of cores.

The dominating limiter in practice is actually garbage collection. I.e., very large heaps will drive the scale up vs. out decision way before cores is a serious issue.
Yes, Lisp has packages. A google search for "lisp packages" finds http://www.flownet.com/ron/packages.pdf which, despite the title, is useful even for those of us who do not consider ourselves idiots.
It shouldn't be an afterthought if you have any expectation of making money.
Scheme since r6rs has a standardized namespace facility.
Summary: there are good and bad programmers. Some are just OK.
Due to the weather, we're moving tonight's meetup indoors to accommodate the 55+ RSVPs thus far on Anyvite.

See you all soon!
The dispacter is probably a bottleneck, looking at the paper http://lamp.epfl.ch/~phaller/doc/haller07actorsunify.pdf I can't really tell how it's implemented.

How does the Scala run queue work? eg have a look at the Erlang article I linked to in my first post.
If someone at Geico can track that the $90 million a year gets them more than that back in business, why is it a bad decision?

Sure, they could create some insurance related content and have some articles show up higher in the rankings, but I doubt they would hit first page for all they keywords they want.
As I said on his blog:

Java's fate is out of the hands of Sun or IBM. The community around it is much larger than either of those companies and anyone who makes decisions about Java based on IBM-Sun rumors isn't doing their job right.

Oddly enough, if the tables were turned and it was Microsoft in a difficult position, we couldn't say the same things about .NET.
Security by obscurity doesn't work well.

I remember reading that thieves target houses whose entrances have some sort of cover, as one of the things they look for.

Instead of complaining to Google about collecting already public information, they should work on stuff like pulling out trees covering the front door.
Alan Kay is not dead. (Maybe he's one of the "[v]ery few programmers ever [to] achieve this level in their own lifetimes".)
Only one of his examples of dead programmers is actually dead.
The "()" thing is something that personally clicks with me in python. I absolutely love methodname as reference always, methodname() as function call always. I'm fetishistic about predictability though.

To your main point, all general purpose languages are good enough at everything. That's how they get to be called "general purpose". But, I would argue that there are 0 languages that are great for everything. There is no language that can be shown to have 0 tradoffs when compared to all other languages.

The thing that often gets over-looked with Ruby is the trade off that many other languages make of developer time and enthusiasm (happiness, comfort, engagement, morale, etc). If you don't believe those factors exist or that they have little value then the trade off the language makes to afford those features is lost in translation.

To make a crude analogy: if I were hiring to get a company off the ground I would love to find a single person to do all of the product concepts, design, implementation, sales, accounting, legal work and support. The problem is that the jack of all trades is master of none and you're likely to get some creative concepting all over your accounting. Languages specialize in thousands of ways over the growth of the language (and hopefully consciously) - much like people do with education and career development. Even at times under the guise of general purposeness.

This is all to say that unfortunately your wanting a language that is great for everything is impossible. But, you might find a language that is good enough at all of the trade-offs you care about without ever trading off all the other things you care about and for all projects for all time.
...running in JRuby in VMWare on an EC2 instance for an abstraction on an abstraction on an abstraction on an abstraction on an abstraction.
Mozilla No Longer Allows Firefox Community Editions?
Address Book isn't necessarily great, but you're right: it absolutely doesn't suck. Combined with its Mail/iChat integration, it makes for a pretty awesome communications suite.

That said, there's still almost certainly room for improvement. Contacts are still seen as a task rather than a pleasure.
A yes, yet another broken way to partition the full richness and complexity of life neatly into made-up pigeonholes.
Yeah, I don't know how this story got votes. It provides no insight and is not interesting.
That's BS. Nuclear War is a great game to play, for all ages (seriously, check it out, it's a fun waste of 30 minutes)
Don't rely only on your perceptions of whats valuable, ask others... you'd be amazed what people will pay for, things like data, pro accounts, products tangentially tied to the purpose of the site etc...

if you'd be willing to share some of the basic details of the idea I'm sure we'd be happy to act as armchair quaterbacks and toss out ideas for how it makes money
I think it's a better idea to read one of the shorter books first (IIRC the Fountainhead is pretty short). Atlas Shrugged could be cut down to about half the size and make the point it's trying to make better (by virtue of being more concise).

Personally I find it fascinating that the characters in the book (and Ayn Rand) constantly reiterate that "decisions should be made on logic and rationality instead of emotions" but the entire book is driven by pathos instead of any logical argument.

All the "good guys and gals" and smart, beautiful and horny. All the bad guys are ugly and stupid. They constantly use tautologies ("A is A") as if it was a way to debate with logic (it's not). And it never provides any attempt to prove that the entire premise is true or even feasible. Say what you want about Karl Marx but he did at least attempt to make a rational argument.

All that said you may still enjoy the book. Personally I've read a lot other books which make the same, or similar, point but better. Animal Farm springs to mind (no, it's not about objectivism, but it is about how power corrupts people, or animals).
I'm guessing I wont be alone in expecting that :-)
Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads
You sure!!