skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I'm right there with you on the IDE v editor issue (maybe vim though). My point is that the daily life of a (typical IDE) programmer in 2009 is very different than one of an emacs developer of the 60s/70s. I agree there has been a lot of useless reimplementation going on (make works just fine for me thanks). But on the whole I think we tend to think in higher level concepts (regardless of our editor choice).

I've also noticed an increasing trend of migrating code to data (though I'm not sure the ones doing it realize this). In the LISP world they are one and the same (as I understand), in most modern programming languages, there's a pretty binary boundary between code and data that people are trying to work around all of the time by "evaling" code or introspection and various other meta-programming techniques.

I believe it should be a continuous space. I think LISP supports this better than most languages. I agree there's definitely a back-to-the-future notion here. But I think the back swing is likely to have an alternate UI to it (in additional to the normal S-expression syntax for us die hard give-me-a-text-editor people).
You'd think that a self-professed hacker would know about password safes.
Creativity needs to think: Good Learning and practicing.

It's simple, if you want to write English, then first you should learn the basics of grammar and spelling. Next, depth learning, like reading articles on news papers or blogs. Finally practicing like writing on own blog or on forums.
Thanks for the feedback!

I actually used to have the big vertical ad ("wide skyscraper") in the right sidebar (where the "Subscribe to updates" etc. boxes are) but it performed terribly. Putting it where it is now increased clickthroughs by something like 10x.

BTW, Google's AdSense terms "[prohibit] placing ads under misleading headings such as 'resources' or 'helpful links.'" https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...
true about the image part. images shouldn't be gzipped, bad examples. It still stands for files less than 2-4 kB.
Yeah, a lot of these "diagnostic" criteria are "void for vagueness" (as a lawyer would say), and all the more so when applied to persons no longer living, who were only written about by contemporaries who didn't think in terms of today's categories. It's interesting to me how many different diseases and disorders have claimed Einstein as a hero over the years. He would have been quite a wreck if he had really had as many disorders or disabilities as current popular writers variously say he had.
Kutcher Plays His Pied Piper Flute And Gets A Million Twitter Followers
Oh yeh fair point. Although I would like to think I didnt mean to appear criminalize the generation. Mostly it is an education problem coupled with the huge availabilty of the material.

That needs to be worked on too.

EDIT: according to the BBC reports last week Cinema attendance is at a record low so I think the data is not 100% cut and dried on your example. Also not convinced piracy would impact on cinema too much - based on the face that Cinema offers an extra experience that DVD's / Pirated copies dont.
The email was address was unmistakeably exactly the email address we gave them. It is largely unguessable, of a specific form with the equivalent of a checksum built in to it, and on our personal domain.
Employee Arrested At Fox/MySpace For Stealing Confidential Information
Sure Javascript doesn't sucks, but i'm not talking about the language, I'm talking about Browser Compatibility. browsers (especially IE) sucks, and javascript works on browsers...
How to Deal With Slow Internet Connections When You Travel
Ultra Light Startups Boston Panel on Crowdsourcing Business
Let me mention some more specifics.

There are skills you can use to help trigger this that goes beyond the specific suggestions in that linked article. Specifically, you train yourself to increase the amount of alpha-band and theta-band activity in your brain. Theta-band is where you start getting creative; alpha-band allows your working consciousness (the one you use to read these words) to visualize/verbalize it in a form that you can understand and remember. The book I sourced this from and use is Anne Wise's High Performance Mind. Note that I didn't really see any double-blind papers cited in there. I can only offer anecdoptal evidence that the techniques in there works for me. YMMV.
Construction Contractor Insurance - Ensuring You to Enjoy Your Job Better
Huge server purchase likely in Chinese WoW deal, The9 left with massive unused capacity
Link to a larger video (and HD): http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=183757000483&r...
I asked the guy who did this what the entry point was,

The file name was not guessed, it was a shell command injection on the website, doing a ls listed an interestingly named file "allinfo.txt". Looking at this, it had the ssh username/password...
One reason is that the Linux version of Flash is terrible last time I used it. Not even from a "open web principles" or "proprietary software is evil!" point of view, but rather in a "it crashes the browser on every 2nd or 3rd video viewing" perspective.
Welcome To Our Site, Sorry You Can’t Use It
100% agree.

Its very hard to keep up. I use the RSS feed, and it seems everytime it updates (hourly) there are 5 new posts. This of course isnt always true, but it does get overwhelming to sift through to the stuff I am interested in reading, and I know good things are lost.

This seems, to me, to be just as big of a problem as the community/culture one.

It would be very interesting if we/they/pg could figure out a way for us to filter or get the best n# of stories per day (say 10, for me). Clearly, 'best' is subjective, but perhaps the most commented, longest on frontpage, or some smart combination of metrics including views, upmods, comments, etc.
Offtopic, im an Hacker/lawyer myself, im interested to get your hindsigth on being that.
for starters, do you use your coding skills in law related matters?
Original article --- http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/04/adam-smith-says-tax-so...
Software companies have been taking exactly the same approach as music labels, with similar results.

I write software, and no, I don't care if anyone ever pays for it "properly". Software is buggy enough already without having protection mechanisms in place that could also have bugs (and they do; I have been burned before, with programs refusing to run that were convinced my original disk was somehow not valid).
This is the best advice I've seen here. You have to relax enough for the creative side to come out. This is one thing that striving forth with a Type-A personality will hinder you. The more you try to be creative, the less creative you will be. The reasons are rooted in physiology. I've posted two comments pointing out the specific physiology, though they are buried and you'd have to scroll down.
Peter Thiel, Jonathan Zittrain: Can Monopolies Save the Internet? (Video)
Like every news aggregation website on the internet?
Yes, i was planning on USD EUR on top and the rest in alphabetical order.
They don't. The updates require you to have a valid account with Impulse and the updates are what point you to the correct servers.

The problem was that with Gamestop breaking the street date, people were playing with legitimate and pirated copies of the game before Stardock was ready to support the rush of people playing. The issues were compounded by various not-so-great decisions like having the game try to connect to the servers and check for updates whenever it is booted up. So, you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems for the legit owners.
Online and anonymous: Swedish ISP refuse to retain Internet data
http://news.ycombinator.com/best

The highest rated posts in the last N days (not sure what N is). Not very well documented, but interesting to know about.
This story is from 2003...
I'm glad the material is available. If only the music, movie and other industries didn't spend so much time fighting it, and instead learned to profit from it.

It might be fairly parochial, but I only know about the US -- but you are right, per capita cinema attendance has been declining since 1930, well before BitTorrent was on the scene, to say the least.

(Reference: http://org.elon.edu/ipe/pautz2.pdf )

Why? More entertainment options as time went by. We are on the tail end of a trend that's been going on for a long, long time.

But in the US, at least, cinema attendance is way up recently, as well as box office receipts:

http://www.contentagenda.com/articleXml/LN953155369.html
Is there an RSS for this? I can seem to find one. Ideas?
Give yourself a chance to have an original thought--dramatically reduce or eliminate TV, and at least temporarily cut out 90% of the music you listen to. You'd be surprised how stuck in a rut you are until you try it.
Keep pushing won't make you more creative. Sometimes, it keeps you from becoming inspired. If anything, you stop pushing.
in which case I think you have a point :)
Not necessarily. You can migrate old instances of a class to the new version of a class, but unlike a relational database, you don't have to. Unlike a relational db, an object db allows storage of many different versions of the same class to be stored. It's up to the application to decided if it needs a particular version to run.

You could for example add a new instance variable and change the way something is calculated and as long as the public interface of the class doesn't change you don't have to migrate the old instances; the new calculation could apply from this date forward.
I don't know why there's this assumption that untracked distribution automatically leads to losses. In fact, it can lead to significant gains.

Consider two scenarios...

One, suppose a paying customer decides to buy something, then finds they don't like it, and wants to return it? In that case, the vendor incurs a cost for dealing with the return, which will mean no ultimate income from the sale. Whereas, a free download to try something and discard it, costs nothing to either side.

Two, suppose the downloaders really like what they see, and share it with friends? And the friends, in turn, share with friends. The item may eventually reach several people who are more than willing to actually buy the product (if it's good). The paradox is that the act of preventing a single "illegitimate" download was blocking many more legitimate sales.

Both of these scenarios highlight perhaps the one thing that vendors are refusing to admit, which is that quality matters most. Anything that is inherently good should have no problem making money even if it's pirated. Their beef might be that they can no longer push crap on the public and make money based on the shininess of their packaging.
> I'm glad the material is available. If only the music, movie and other industries didn't spend so much time fighting it, and instead learned to profit from it.

Spotify. Last.fm. Itunes. All legit ways to get the exact same music :) (at various cose).

Movies: well yeh still a bit laggy there. But things are improving. Though frankly I am not one to blame the industry for trying to get rid of the pirates (even if it is fruitless) before opening up their catalogues.

IMO these are different issues that quickly get confused by people :)
I agree, but programming will follow suit.

CASE didn't cut it because business users, the REAL target customers for CASE, weren't savvy enough yet. Now, business users are just as likely to look at code as they are business requirements. I see this often in my work. So, the original idea of replacing unkempt engineers with smooth business people can probably move forward soon.

But, don't get me wrong, it won't be because business users are now savvy enough to take on hard-core programming. Rather it will be due to an active open-source community, who have been working to give business users big chunks of modular functionality that they can use like Duplo blocks to build the software solutions they need.

In the corporate world, the future role of software developers, to me, is seeming to tend towards a Business Analyst/Systems Engineering role-combination.
Watch naruto shippuden 105 online
Start up valuation estimator
Its likely an automated/keyword filter, or a list they bought from someone else.

Turning off all filtering invites phishing, spyware, malware into your network, so thats not a great solution. My bet is that 9 times out of 10, if you email IT and they check it out, they can get it whitelisted.
For artists and maybe hackers, I have some friends who found inspiration through this book (it's not easy to do some of the exercises, very internal)

Book recommendation: The Artist's Way

"The Artist's Way is a workbook for anyone who is creative, feels blocked in their creativity or wishes that they were more creative. The book begins with the statement that everyone is creative and has an artist within them, and the point of this course is to recover that inner artist. It is divided into a twelve-week course, with assignments much like any semester-long college class."

http://www.theartistsway.com/

http://paperartstudio.tripod.com/artistsway/
As execs defect, is this the end of an era for Google?
Sadly, the fact remains that users don't read dialog boxes[1]. If you want to make a computing "appliance" that is not going to be subject to attack, you'll have to disallow owner-administrators and software installations altogether.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html
Functional programming with python
Thanks for the link - it's so hard to get around all of the spam when searching for a online CS degree, I completely missed DePaul. The program looks pretty good.
If you allow young people to have the content free when they have no money then they will like it enough to pay for it when they do.

This is the principle of "student" edition software.
But not something illegal under Swedish law.
Well not until this verdict.
http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/tdd
TDD: Test Driven Development (programming methodology)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
Same thing happened at my work as well. Didn't last long.
The problem is businesses are never satisfied with the duplo blocks, it gives them no competitive advantage. They nearly always want highly customized software that precisely fits their needs; no, programmers aren't going anywhere any time soon.
It is easier because

(1) The tasks becomes so automatic, you no longer have to think about it and "work through it". It sinks into the subconscious. This is important.

(2) When the tasks becomes automatic, you naturally relax. Being relaxed, creativity and inspiration comes out. You cannot force it out. Stress kills creativity. Fear-inspired creativity typically manifests as paranoia.

(3) This is why some people can get oddly-inspired brilliance as a complete n00b in a craft. He doesn't know anything, yet sometimes he is relaxed enough that some randomly brilliant thing comes out. Often, this fades away with more mastery of the craft. It is why children are often perceived as naturally more creative.

(4) Someone who has mastered a craft to the point where it requires no thinking can be far more creative than the complete n00b. A master's inspiration takes advantage of deep understanding of his craft, so not only would it be far more effective, it is much more consistent.

(5) The four stages of competancy: unconsciously incompetant, consciously incompetant, consciously competant, unconsciously competant.

Most people reach the stage of consciously competancy (which requires concentration) and stop there. This is the stage where you've "learned" something and you "get" it. To reach the stage of unconsciously competancy, however, requires an incredible amount of practice and repetition (Malcom Gladwell's ballpark-nice-round-number of 10,000 ... which depending on the skill, really isn't all that much).

An example in the case of programming: I remember when I first learned the Ruby syntax. While I had other languages under my belt, I still had to mentally, and deliberately parse the syntax, and then try to understand the flow. Now, if I look at a codebase I am reasonbly familiar with, I can glance at it. I don't really see the code itself so much as how it all fits together. I have not yet mastered the syntax to the point where I can glance at unfamiliar code and do that.

Another example related to programming: I've seen would-be-programmers struggle to type their programs. For them, they have not reached a stage of unconscious competancy with typing. They have to frame bits of their thoughts and then deliberately type it out. Some touch-typists I know are not that much better. For me, having played so much MUDs back in its heyday, I've learned how to type well enough that it is no longer an interface bottleneck for me.

Example from martial arts: There is actually a ton of material written about this subject of creativity in the "boxing ring", some of the surviving ones written a couple hundred years ago or more. One of my favorite is the Japanese densho, Neko no Myojutsu. A modern (though more obtuse) treatise about this subject is "Effortless Power". Both books discusses the cases about creativity, the newbie, and the master craftsmen.
What about cases where you want to illustrate that the something being done is not "standard" -- to provide an extra hint.

Either way, there is at least one case where the custom block iterator doesn't cover the usage of "for" - where you need the variables outside the scope of the loop.
I've seen a 90% piracy rate mentioned in several articles now; I wouldn't be surprised if it's industry standard. If so, Stardock is actually doing much better than mainstream publishers.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy...

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/soccer-game-has-90-pi...
I don't think the churn is a big problem yet, but I think the position of stories on the front page uses a formula similar to gravity. Upward acceleration is determined by upvotes/time and downward acceleration is determined by the time since submission. pg could always decrease the acceleration of "gravity" on the formula (to allow popular stories to stay on the front page longer) and/or decrease the "acceleration" per upvote (to prevent less popular stories from jumping to the front page so quickly).

So if this becomes a big problem, it shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Just produce. A lot. It's hard to produce original work in a medium without first mastering the medium itself. There's an old chestnut about the pottery class in which half was graded on quality and the other on quantity; in the end, the quantity half produced better work. Picasso's early work, while technically good, was pretty run-of-the-mill as far originality.

Also, as some other commenters have said, expose yourself to as much different stimulus as possible. If you're not an out-of-the-box thinker, this serves to make your box bigger.
1 image for each request? Are you putting all the images for each page into one image file, then cropping the needed region for each image on your page?
I recently discovered Troy University has an office local to me as well as offering the Computer Science degree online.

Growing up, near Tallahassee, Troy was always seen as a great school for those individuals going into fields like Sports Medicine.
That's not new at all. If anything there are fewer of them now.
“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay if we could. If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned.”

"As for the fate of the site, Peter has already promised that The Pirate Bay will continue. The site itself was never on trial, only the four individuals listed above."

I LOVE Peter's attitude. I will always be a big supporter of the Pirate Bay.

File sharing is NOT stealing.
I've noticed that too. Big stories (i.e. ones written by Paul Graham) used to stay up here for days, they do no longer. My guess is they increased the time factor to account for the increase in traffic.
It's a problem. No modern man understands all his written obligations.

> Perhaps an opportunity of a startup that would introduce a new way of writing contracts

Yes! Every contract I've ever seen is just an analog program, a decision tree really. Legal concepts are mostly classes. Since you can do things like multiple inheritance with OO you should be able to mimic contract law in a program. But is designing such a service lucrative?

The hardest language in contracts - apart from all the whereupons and nods to the Magna Carta - has to do with contingency planning and minor details. It's all the "if A then B when (C | D)" cover-your-ass reserve. That stuff can get pretty terse and for most people it's a total waste of time to muddle through, so we just sign it and hope it didn't give away our wife as chattel. Of course when we cut out these complexities our contracts might not be as watertight. But I think this should be a judgment call between the participants. What good is a "safe" agreement if no one but a judge can understand it?

You would probably want to focus on a small, profitable subset of contracts. Take web startup investing. There ought to be a way for Startup X to have a form on its site that lets me invest in their company. Maybe that's just too wild of an idea for 2009 but if startups become financially transparent -- I mean really transparent -- micro investing is bound to happen. Government loopholes notwithstanding.
Blah-blah-blah. =)

I have one very simple test for all those virtualization over-hyped guys - how many 64-bit Oracle instances you can run on typical, 2-U HP Proliant Server?

For example, 7 Xen systems for developers including two 64-bit Oracle instances (10g and 9) on Proliant and 7 Xen Guests on 8-core Dual Xeon 1U server at datapipe.

The real cat is better than paper tiger.
I don't understand exactly what you're saying. He's pointing out that TDD fixes bugs that you think might be relevant, but putting your code in front of users finds real bugs. Then, you can fix those, and your software is better for it, since it addresses all the cases your user actually sees.

I'll admit we don't practice TDD where I currently work, so I might be missing something. He even says that there are many other reasons for using TDD, and his criticism here is only towards it as a bug-fixing tool. Given that, how is this not a valid critique?
To me, it feels more like reddit some years ago.
I use linode for this and while it works on other sites like pandora, no dice on hulu. I get a "sorry, unable to stream this video. check your internet connection" message. Figured maybe they ban IP address blocks belonging to known hosts.
clickable link: http://www.bluemailcentral.com
The Power Of Passed Links
In Spain they X-ray your luggage before you can get to the platform for most long distance trains.
My School has blockers unfourtunately. Blocked me from reading a government website about suicide for an english report.
Cool, that's why it's called HACKER news here :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553959
Peter Sunde said:

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay if we could. If I would have money I would rather burn everything I owned.”
Take a look at the front page. The right half is blank space.

That space can be used to show two sections: popular & upcoming.
You could do this by taking an integral of position over the last 72 hours. This way, "sleeper" stories that take some time to rise in popularity can also appear in the RSS feed.
Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com - Keeper of the flame
Cliff's Notes: "Asperger's and intelligence are both poorly understood."