skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There should be a way for the readers of wiki to know which sections have been there for a while (therefore probably more accurate), and which parts are frequently changed (therefore more debatable), so that they can get a better picture of the reliability of those information.
Forget MTV - Apple's iPod ads are the new music-star makers
Wow, I thought it was just me! Bonus points: linux, osx and windows versions.

*err, looks like the linux version isn't out yet. still, the 8.6 version is quite good.
Please to note that my initial objection was basically of the same flavor, ie, "why is the article conflating programming languages and the Crusades?"
Memory leaks, Firefox, Flock and Opera
Has anyone asked Austin about his thoughts on releasing GPL clients? Theres no doubt he has a passion to continue massaging world-data and refining the simulator design; I think if he knew users would still purchase binary client and data releases, pushed out through dvd's or bittorrent like he already does, he might make the switch from proprietary to free software.
TechCrunch's Editorial Slip? Viral video affair...
Maybe I am over analyzing: Given the current visibility of Islamic extremism, its less distracting to talk about current non-issues.
I very much enjoyed the discussion, I'm sorry if it got heated. In any case, I think single-exit is fine for a corporation that needs to use clearly-defined, easy-to-follow policies. It's a reasonable baseline.

However, there are cases where trying to workaround multiple exits does lead to more errors. A function that returns 'right' 'left' or 'both' is probably better off having 3 returns rather than assigning the result to a local variable and carrying it to the end of the function. You might declare the local as the wrong type, you might forget an 'else' and accidentally overwrite the return value, etc. "No early exits unless your function has no side-effects" is a lot less clear to most programmers.

Of those 495 bugs on the bug list, how many were caused by broken side-effects?
How do you see this as crazy expensive?

RHEL for 32-bit is $0.11 over the $0.10/hr EC2 instance fees.
Being used to a life of consumer goods, 'caveat venditor', and hordes of ambulance chasers, maybe each passing generation forgets how to practice 'caveat emptor'. It's probably called 'critical thinking' in the educational circles.

A lot of students no longer use the index, or table of contents. Or at least http://scholar.google.com/ if they don't have access to the LexisNexis, or something similar. Or maybe they are just going through the motion, practicing being a mindless drone.

But that just points out the failing of the teachers, not the students. Warren Buffett has an interesting perspective on this: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/clubs/investment/WarrenB...

-----

Q: What is your view on education?

A: Bill Gates thinks we're [America] falling behind. [Mr. Buffett speaks with Bill Gates frequently]. I had a great advantage when I went to public school compared with kids today. When I was in school there were very few career opportunities for women, so an enormous number of very talented women became teachers, and I benefited from their instruction. Today there are many more career opportunities, and as a result the pool of potential teachers has shrunk.

-----
I've often thought that certain revisions should be marked as "more-or-less correct" meaning that there is no vandalism or any obvious mistakes. A cookie could be placed for readers who only want to read such versions. This might mean that there's one-more-damn-thing to constantly administer, but it would keep cross dressing pictures off the GWB page. (Oh, wait, that really happened...)
I worked in a new media marketing department as an intern for awhile and this is exactly the kind of things they were looking into doing. They wanted to generate buzz by promoting in various online communities as a "community member." Not surprisingly, this is where they had their most success. I fortunately didn't have to participate in the buzz generation but there's no question everyone is looking to do this kind of marketing, whether you like it or not. Marketers will do anything to get eyeballs on their message.
Why Digg is Blocked
A good laptop case + sleep mode helps. (I have working sleep mode even in Linux...)

Or you can just have a cofounder there to watch your stuff ;-) (See, THIS is why startups need cofounders... :)
Spoiler: The butler did it.
I lost you at the beginning of the 2nd paragraph. Nobody who knows how to muscle their ways in C++ feels good after transitioning to Java. There is nothing "liberating" in this hog for someone who knows C++. There is nothing in Java that one can call "beautiful" or "enjoyable". I am sorry to sound like an idiot (yes, I have re-read what I just wrote) but I cannot help it - Java is full of hidden messages like "oh, we feel like you're too stupid to have this or that kind of power, so just sit in a sandbox and enjoy the ride". And indeed, most programming idiots I've met in my career called themselves "Java programmers".

No statically typed language without powerful template system nor multiple inheritance of some sort should be considered usable in this age and time. Java/C# (same shit) was designed for "enterprise software" development, something a CS grad should never, never, never consider doing.

Ruby is the opposite of all that - Ruby represents ultimate freedom of expression. C++ runs circles around Java in that regard. Ruby only takes it several levels higher. In Ruby you really do feel like changing the world, as long as your world is written in Ruby as well. It's sad you missed it as the main point of the great post.

P.S. Go get yourself some decent C++ book.
Fruit Salad
Sharing what matters
Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word
How to capture audio from the browser? 
Can this be done from the server without a browser plugin?
I like the term a lot. However, popup blocking is actually a real feature since sometimes you want to block popups and sometimes you don't. Designing a system that makes sorting out allowed vs. disallowed in a user friendly way is non-trivial and is in fact a feature of a browser. It's especially a feature if enabling means, as it did for the Internet Explorer team, going back and changing old functionality to allow for blocking.
Skip

two

lines.
About half the bugs I've seen were caused either by poor variable naming or single entry/single exit violations

I honestly can't remember seeing a bug caused by either. Sorry. Obviously, experiences vary quite a bit in this respect. From what I've seen, the most common causes of bugs are:

1. Off-by-one errors.
2. Platform incompatibility.
3. Allocation issues (C/C++)
4. Shared state problems.
5. Not releasing/closing resources.

Function returns? Variable names? They just don't figure.
Use Flash + Flash Media Server
When an employment relationship is a bigger commitment, employers are much more hesitant to hire.
Flash is a browser plugin.
Check out the section with the code. Not the nicest code I have seen. They seem to confuse the user agent with the referrer, and they encourage you to call the file "fftest.php". The JavaScript is silly, since they require PHP on the server instead of just doing it all in JavaScript, and I don't think it will even work since they are taking the referrer from the JavaScript file which should be the page that requested it.
Wow I never would have guessed that spamming can work.
Most languages hackers like do. Python is a bit of an anomaly in this respect.
I didn't really read the article, but the title gave me another idea:

Type your (potential or existing) password into Google. If you get any hits, it's not a good password.

Of course there are exceptions, and just because Google doesn't get any hits doesn't mean it definitely is a good password. But it seems like a decent measure of password security.
Please ignore this.

The guy who started this whole "why(firefox|digg|etc)isblocked.com" thing is a sleazebag SEO jackass. This is just another publicity stunt of his.
Internet Outages Could Occur By 2010 As Capacity Stalls
Razzle Clones Woot
First of all, I didn't say anything negative about Ruby. Yes, maybe I missed the point of the article. Maybe the author just wanted to say "Ruby is good". But I read the article as saying something about how to choose a language based on joy and harmony and that's what I take issue with, not with Ruby in particular.

Second, I have read a lot of good C++ books and I'll even admit that I take some perverse kind of pleasure from template acrobatics as presented in Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design for instance. But in 1995 - 1997 I was overwhelmed by the complexity of C++ and Java was a relief for me and many others. Yes it was naive, and yes every ex C++ programmer started to miss things very soon. But even after learning so much more about C++, I still feel the complexity/power ratio of C++ is awful.

In 1995, when Java came along, C++ was less powerful. There was no proper template support, no standard library, not even a string class. You had to use evil stuff like MFC to get anything done at all. And it took until the early 21st century for anyone to really grasp templates and write good books about how to use them. So, that's why I still understand the gut reaction of relief when Java emerged. But, as I said, I regret to have reacted in a such a purely emotional way without checking out other options. You apparently did, and you have my respect for that.
I want control of my data
Mobile web: user experience a disaster
I wish the author said why programming in Ruby makes him feel good. His statements could be made about any language. Many people program in language X because they like language X, and that doesn't apply just to Ruby. "I program in Ruby because it makes me feel good" is an empty statement.

Did you program in other languages? Did they also make you feel good? Why/why not? Do you think languages in which you haven't programmed could make you feel even better than Ruby?

I hope most people who program in Ruby have better reasons than "it makes me feel good." If they didn't, I wouldn't feel good programming in Ruby.
Is there a firefox and/or IE javascript hook that simulates control- and control+? I mean a way to have a user click a button to resize all fonts, not just switching between predefined font sizes in style sheets.
Half of High-Tech Innovations at DEMO Germany were Israeli!
2001: Business Week explains why Apple stores won't work
Oh, how bad are the TC editor's talking bad of the always good marketers who are only trying to improve the consumers life!
Change the assignment to include identifying Wikipedia discrepancies, fixing them, and tracking the changes for a period of time.
Great article, but then hindsight always is. I've always been an admirer of Jobs, despite his purported failings. How Apple continues into the future will be interesting to see.
Apple Settles Patent Lawsuit - Are patents a good thing?
I've always seen patents (in software) as a means for larger companies to squash any kind of competition from small startups. What is the experience by people on here? Do you check for existing patents first or do you just 'go for it' ?
You'll never be this good at games...
Before I read the article, I thought you were being a jerk... then I read the article.
Good point. I failed to point out that a lot of this history was in technologies where state was often global (COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC). How times have changed.
These things are always fun to read.

Note that this article was written in May 2001. The iPod was announced in October 2001. Nobody saw it coming, and even after it arrived lots of people doubted that it would sell. If the iPod hadn't been invented, it's possible that Business Week's analysis would have held up better -- the iPod drives a lot of shoppers into the Apple Stores.

All the doom-and-gloom comparisons to the Gateway Store look hilarious now. My understanding is that the Gateway Stores were not the problem; it was the Gateways that were the problem.
Single entry/single exit refers to ANY process, not just functions. Don't underestimate the hell who can go through with poor variable naming. Case in point:

2 months ago, a client needed significant changes to a major process in their app. (I had 2 weeks.) This process was a BASIC subroutine called by 16 other processes. Now get this: It was 2800 lines of code with one entry and 16 different exits. It was written in 1991 and had been modified 68 times before I came along. Here are a few of the variables: A, AA, AAA, AAAA, B, BB, BBB, BBBB, C, CC, CCC, CCCC, INFO, FORM1, FORM2, FORM3, HOLD.FORM2, OLD.FORM2, ORIG.FORM2, STUFF, DUMMY1, DUMMY2, DUMMY3... You get the idea. I spent 4 days renaming variables before I could start refactoring. There were some variables I never did figure out. I rewrote the program (550 lines) and hit the deadline. I uncovered over 20 undocumented bugs. I wonder what it will look like 5 years from now.

Everything I write new is either Javascript or PHP. Now that my startup is ramping up, soon I won't have to deal with any of this old stuff any more.

(Aside: I wonder how much production code in the world today is over 10 years old. And how much has been modified over 10 times?)
No need for anyone to apologize. We should all have pretty thick skin here.

My only regret: I took a 5 minute break and posted a top 10 list for a few chuckles. I ended up spending 2 hours here and didn't finish my day's work until after midnight. Pretty soon I may need a 12 Step program for news.ycombinator.com.
TechCrunch feels spammy now.

Is it clear Tc haven't got payment from that company in exchange for their post?
I'm not sure... I've become addicted to my vertical split-screen in emacs.

Often, I feel like I can only have so many finger macros loaded at once. I do a lot of switching back and forth merely to reference stuff. Error messages, output, data structure definitions, grammars, etc-- if you're trying to modify code based on information like that, it helps a ton to be able to see that and your code at the same time.

When working on multiple projects, it's easy to forget about stuff that gets buried; especially buried under explorer windows.

If you're waiting for an important email or IM or something, being able to see activity on a separate screen out of the corner of your eye is often preferable to (a) periodically checking or (b) setting some sort of flashy or loud message box alert

If you have server monitoring requirements, or stock market monitoring requirements... the list goes on. Screen real estate is important, so long as it's organized appropriately.

YMMV, of course. I've had issues like this for my whole life. If I need to use a reference for something, I slow way way down unless the reference is convenient.
When I'm moving around I often use a backpack to carry my laptop (I don't know how much of a threat this really is, but if I were going to mug someone I'd be more likely to go after the guy carrying case that almost certainly has a laptop in it, vs. a guy carrying a beat-up old bag that might just be full of dirty clothes.)

So I often throw in a keyboard and mouse. The microsoft 'comfort curve' is particularly well-suited for this, though it is a bit long.
The incomparable Umair Haque
There's noprocrast. Lifesaver (well, timesaver) for me...
I thought the same thing. Just post something annoying, and everybody will surf to your page to rant. Cheap... Especially funny is the domain name - why create a page for the sole purpose of blocking digg? Not very credible.
You are Too Young to Be Trying This
No need for that. I can handle it. Sure, I can. Really, I can.
And I bet a week's pay that Ron Paul will be the cause.

But let's analyse the statements in the article. The core is fine, peering is fine, last mile in Europe and Japan are fine... etc. The only ones who are screwed are last-mile customers in North America. The same people who have been sold 2Mbit "broadband" that is explicitly throttled upstream and quietly throttled downstream, by companies that have already received $billions in tax breaks to upgrade their damned systems.
I think it was the most interesting article to appear on TC for a long time. Why should the author have to pay to get it published???
I hope that is a joke (especially the guy "solving" it with a emulation in LISP).
Because it was a direct advertisement of their business, which was "shady advertisement practices".
Sounds as if multiple exits were the least of the problems of that code.
THT vs THH

If you are looking for pattern #2, and you roll THT, you can start over at the third flip. Thus THTHH finds the second pattern.

If you are looking for pattern #1, and you roll THH, you have to flip a forth time to start over.

I'm not a mathematician, so that's probably not right anyway. Obviously, he's looking for some kind of "trick".
Nice post. Didn't see a copyright or DRM. Permission to cut & paste it into my own future posts?
I don't understand the appeal of such services. It is one thing to fall for the standard sales ploys while out shopping ("only for a limited time", "now or never", etc.). But to expose yourself to them deliberately and knowingly? Their customers must have a serious shopping addiction.
Life before Wikipedia was alright. Banning shouldn't really matter much.
Storing the data in a "coherent way", as tfa says when it refers to schemas in a relational database, is what makes "asking questions" fast. Freenode's goal is to remove the schema and replace it with a graph to allow "any type of question" to be asked and make the data less structured. It's a great idea, but this will surely be much slower when it comes to asking any moderately complicated question.
UK 2017: under surveillance
http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/998241 gives a decent overview.

My tip is to also track versions of all prod deployments so you know which one was active in production when.
We have a backlog of 495 bugs on the bug list. The original cause of about one third of these was [...]

How could they know the cause of bugs that hadn't been fixed yet?
the fact that it could be said about any language is part of his point. ruby isn't the one true language. just program in whatever language makes you feel good, be it ruby or not. nevertheless, some languages feel more zen-like on the average. for instance, find me one person who ever felt good programming anything in cobol.
It does not cost free software developers anything to avoid anti-features

Damn well better not cost them anything since their remuneration is zero.
A small introduction to Python Eggs
Scientists should learn to program
Life before the web was alright, but I would be unhappy if it went away.
TC has always been spammy. Their editorial is dictated by 'cover who we know, cover who we've invested in' type mentality. Not to mention, MA gives soooo much publicity to PPP and yet he says he despises them. LOL!

Anyway, I'e been reading GigaOM these days.. a lot more balanced view.
Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far
I'll keep an eye out for it. Good luck.
This is a good post (and other posts below). But... "scientists" is not a descriptive word. If you are talking about biologists, they'd gain more from knowing high school math than from programming. Math majors on the other hand need to program if they want to find jobs outside the actuarial field. Same for physics and chemistry. A regular C++/Java course should be enough to get started.
Definr: Incredibly fast dictionary
As far as I've seen, most scientists work with R for statistics and TeX for papers; it sounds like this reduces to "Scientists should learn powerful tools.".
"Most people surf on a pay-per-kilobyte model, which encourages them to surf as fast as they can, he says."

Especially if they are using the Firefox operating system.

The NYT really needs to stop hiring journalists and editors who are technologically illiterate.
I haven't noticed them paying undue attention to startups they've invested in. And all reporters cover who they know, in the sense that they put more emphasis on info that comes from trusted sources. In fact TC is probably more open to stories that come in over the transom than the average reporter.
Dark brown (grey?) text on black background = w00t!

IMO, the most valuable lesson from the article: Don't do that. There might be something better in there, but I literally couldn't read it.
How many of your bosses did not go to college?
I think it's about time somebody stood up for the "curly braces stand alone" school.

I mean, we can debate silly stuff all day, like LISP versus C, Firefox vs. IE, Mac vs. PC, web 1.0 vs web 2.0, etc. But these "braces on the same line" guys are just completely out of their minds. :) <-- Smiley face means humor was used in this comment.
Jef Raskin's 1979 proposal for web-like Apple Computer Network
Dark gray. 6 point font. Maybe it's my cheap LCD, but I swear there's a gradient on the letters making them darker at the top of the page.
He lost me when he started quoting The Alchemist.
this is ironic coming from someone who's caused many people to lose data through his blog hosting service.
Damn, and to think, all that time I spent reading technology blogs and writing code, I could have been playing video games.
I recently read something similar about Kleiner Perkins investing in "The Google.com Company" and how risky it was and how unlikely Google was to succeed against the "giant" of Yahoo.

Stuff like this makes me laugh :)
I've done development at various local libraries and I would definitely recommend this over coffee shops. There are more wireless restrictions at libraries but the quiet, privacy, and space to work more than makes up for it.
While they're at it, I want access to tons more data regarding content traffic than any social network currently provides. Myspace gives you a "profile has been viewed X times" feature, and for musicians there's a half-assed attempt to track plays and downloads. I don't think facebook does even that (I can't recall though, it might be buried somewhere in Facebook's clunky interface.)
I don't believe anyone who says programming is hard.

Learning to write small programs in a high-level language such as python is much easier than learning a natural language.

The former you can do in a week or less. The latter requires years.
Horrible site, tiny dark gray font on a black background, very hard to read, in fact not worth reading. When will people learn, make your damn site easy to read if you want to be read.
Are You an Ad Supported Startup? - Analysis
oh my god, this is priceless! one of my favorite things about apple is that competitors and analysts can't seem to grok the company at all.
If scientists should learn programming, we should meet them halfway and learn some science.

I've always wanted to do cool numerical stuff like n-body codes, computational fluid dynamics, etc, but I never really knew where to get started.

It doesn't help that most example code out there is spaghetti garbage written in Fortran.
Not so. Natural language is easier because I can learn in a minute to say "Hello world" in a language like German. But it takes forever to fluently write bug-free code for million-line projects.

It's a good question to discuss, if we can get past simplistic apples-to-oranges comparisons. On the one hand natural languages have large vocabularies and cultural context that must be assimilated over time. On the other hand pidgin German works where pidgin lisp does not - natural languages allow more error in the medium.
Bad Angel Bad Entrepreneur at  No VC Required
That is a great term. I've been searching for years to sum up that concept so elegantly. Probably since first time I encountered copy-protection on a video game (X-Wing on a 486, I think it was)
It only takes a minute to learn to say "Hello World" in Python also.

I'm not talking about writing bug-free code for million-line projects. Rather, I'm taking about writing simple small programs. That's easy.