skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just skimmed the manual a bit, so I'm still quite uninformed. Does it require bidi translations? If so, that's quite a limitation as most of the data manipulations I've done have been at least a bit lossy.

Some formalisms would certainly be nice though..it's easy to think that you've transformed data well only to find holes in your methods later.
Beware the Security Metric at Mozilla Security Blog
I use a combination of TDD and long conversations with myself. Here is my algorithm in the form of a checklist:

CHECKLIST FOR CODING

[ ] Is there a conversation with self about this program?
[ ] Is there a user scenario that has been customer validated?
[ ] Does the conversation describe the user scenario that does not work?
[ ] Does the conversation describe the user interface that the scenario needs?
[ ] Does the conversation describe the API that the user interface needs?
[ ] Does the program contain tests for this new API?
Well, Their site requires Javascript for no good reason, so that's a point against them.
Biggest advantage off the top of my head is memory usage (which matters when you are on a memory constrained VPS like a 256 slice). Nginx memory usage stays low under lots of load, since it has a constant number of workers and a job queue. I'm not clear on how exactly Apache does it, but my understanding is that it forks a child process to service each request, so under high loads gobbles up memory.

Second graph here illustrates:
http://blog.webfaction.com/a-little-holiday-present

Personally, I also find Nginx more straightforward to configure, but I know that is mostly personal preference.

As an aside: I really love Engine Yard for sponsoring the development of this.
from my experience, that's dumb advice. equity financing being simpler than debt? please. worried about multiple investors with different warrant coverage? try having entirely different classes of preferred shareholders on for size.

it sounds like this post is more of a warning against convertible debt with warrants, which, while at times very beneficial to the entrepreneur, can be more complicated to understand. but debt can and should be dead-simple, should be a 3-10 page document, and can be prepared for less than $5k in legal fees.

equity, on the other hand, is generally a 30-100 page document, has many, many more negotiation points than debt, and, due to the extreme complexity, can easily cost anywhere from $15k-$70k in legal fees.

further, a well negotiated debt agreement can be very beneficial to the founders, while being relatively fair to the investors: the founders get to benefit from a Series A upside down the road. even if you don't have the leverage to pull off a conversion of debt based on a discount of the series A price, a capped conversion isn't such a bad thing, either, given that it's so much simpler to pull off than equity.
I am a programmer and I want to be one. Unlike "web designer", this is the first time I've come across negative feelings to the term "programmer" and I can't really see why (if you want to insult a programmer call them a code monkey).

What title would you prefer over programmer?
May I make a point here? Youtube, Google video, Rapidshare etc all host copyrighted material of some sort so why is the pirate bay being targeted here?
GitHub releases integrated issue tracking
Somehow I doubt it matters one bit how you use reverse psychology (or don't), they'll have sex anyways. It might work fine for things like "Walk against red at a crossing", but with sex your fighting hormones.

The legal age for consent is 15 in my country, so the idea is somewhat absurd to me. There was plenty of virgins in my high school, plenty who wasn't (and some lost theirs quite a bit earlier). Doesn't seem to matter one bit.

Although maybe that mind trick worked on me when mother told me to go out and have fun partying with the other kids when I hit puberty, I go out drinking substantially less than my peer at the university do.

This needs to be sent to our alchol stores that are a monopoly controled by the government (I think that's absurd too) who are only allowed to run adds against drinking, it would be hilarious if they started running adds telling you to drink.. so you wouldn't.

I live in Sweden, btw.
last I tried it wasn't really usable. I moved to intelliJ (or just emacs) for the most part. IntelliJ support is quite good (although it does tend to freeze up for a few seconds everynow and then, getting better).

Regardless of what people think about eclipse, it is kind of a default choice for a lot of the mainstream, so I am guessing a lot of people would be interested in quality scala support.

Would love to know what state this is in, but I just don't have time to check myself.
I've started, grown, and sold a food startup - contact me privately if you'd like to know more about what I learned...
Richard Stallman nominated to be in MIT 150 exhibition
OK, mine isn't that nice. He raised the rent by $150 a few months ago.
I've always found that attitude slightly strange. Having expended a lot of time and effort learning a functional language, why not program in it?
Also, from mynameishere's Wikipedia reference:

"The end of the Flynn effect?: A study of secular trends in mean intelligence test scores of Norwegian conscripts during half a century"

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.intell.2004.06.004

After all, this makes sense. Flynn effect seems to be working mostly by reducing "bad stuff" going on that would make you dumber than your potential (most of the gains are concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half).

Once everybody's environment is more or less ok, there is no magic that will start to produce geniuses from normal people.
Hmmm....

Edsger Dijkstra described himself as a "humble programmer" in his Turing lecture (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EW...). Don Knuth categorizes his contributions in three groups: "As a researcher... As a university professor... And as a programmer..." (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/bio.dvi). Joseph Weizenbaum's New York Times obituary headline called him a "Famed Programmer" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/world/europe/13weizenbaum....). Tony Hoare's description of his work on implementing Algol includes this: "I eventually married Jill, the other programmer who came to work on the same project" (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/3/21782-an-interview-with... -- ACM access required).

Maybe one day if I work very hard and am very lucky people will think I am a programmer, too.
Yeah but to be fair he said you should learn a decent language from all paradigms, things like Smalltalk, Haskell, Prolog, C etc. and not specifically functional programming.
He was quite specific about learning Lisp though, probably because of the metaprogramming aspect.
I'm going to discuss your comment in three parts. Thank god this isn't reddit as I'd probably follow up with a "Your shit's all fucked up and you talk like a fag" or a pun type post.

Your first assertion is that people who decry high IQs as the sole purviews of snotty brats is a combination of sour grapes and a biased sample. I can't speak based on a scientific sample of high IQ folk. I can only speak for myself and people I know. My IQ (in case you were wondering) is 167 according to SB5 testing (I was tested through most of my childhood and some of my early academic life) putting me in the fairly smart range. To provide a counterpoint, I'll quote Alfred Binet (the 'B' in SB5) and just say:

"The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." - Binet 1905.

There are snotty brats with low IQs. There are snotty brats with high IQs. Thus we can surmise that in any given sample of sufficient size regardless of IQ there are snotty brats. If you don't believe me I suggest you visit 4chan.org sometime.

Your second comment tries to pair correlation with reality. In some cases this works, in your example it doesn't as "real intelligence" is undefined, yet we are expected to accept that this undefined and unmeasured form of intelligence correlates with IQ. If you were to define what constitutes real intelligence then there's a point of discussion, but you must admit that your statement 'Whatever "real intelligence" is' implies that you don't know what it is - to be honest no-one does and that's the problem. An IQ score doesn't provide a measure of real intelligence, only problem solving within a measured subset of boundaries.

This then acts as a counterpoint for your third argument being that:

The science cannot be strong if "real intelligence" is less definable than "Real Madrid". Therefore I pose the counterpoint that correlation of an individual's success rate of "Real Madrid" (whatever "success rate" is) is more valid than correlation with "Real intelligence".

After all, "Real Intelligence" never won La Liga, the European cup, and so on, yet noone would ever argue against the genius of Real Madrid's European cup winning squads, no more than you could argue with the master strokes of Van Gogh or Raphael, nor the abilities of Newton - despite his inferior understanding of modern mathematics and logic, nor the ancient greeks despite their limitations.

One of the things I really appreciate about HN is that people have constructive arguments and disagreements. I completely accept that there's an element of fun in the topic I discussed (particularly about football teams) but I would like to say that although I don't agree with you, thanks for expressing your opinion and challenging mine. It's always good to have to rethink your worldview :)
College is amust! Dixi.
Not just concise, but also readable. An example: translate lists into 'english text' lists. That is ["Apples"] -> "Apples", ["Apples", "Oranges"] -> "Apples and Oranges", ["Apples", "Oranges", "Pears"] -> "Apples, Oranges and Pears", etc.

(Problem a slight modification of the one described here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2009/04/15/comma-q... )

The haskell solution:

englishList [] = ""
englishList [only] = only
englishList [first,last] = first ++ " and " ++ last
englishList (first:rest) = first ++ ", " ++ (englishList rest)

It's short, but completely readable. Compare that to the solutions given in the blog comments.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 82 – Six Million Dollar Man Vs Sasquatch
Since no discussion is complete if it is one-sided, I offer an alternative perspective:

(PDF link) http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-625.pdf

"Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110- to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take fewcars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.

Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by a mere 0.7 to1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.

These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail’s market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn’t work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?

As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers’ money after bad. Once projects are completed, most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operationalprofits, while taxpayerswill remain vulnerable if the trains lose money.

In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits."

And with that, I'm going to get a pseudonym. Hacker News users aren't just random people on the internet, they're people I'd like to work with someday. And I usually avoid discussing contentious political issues with my colleagues unless they bring it up first and seem thick-skinned. If there's going to be politics on hacker news, then I, as me, must go.
I suspect that the Flynn effect begins and ends with the improvement to diet

Flynn points to data from a World War II famine in the occupied Netherlands showing that the famine region had no difference in IQ changes over time from the region that didn't experience famine. The IQ score increase has also occurred in countries that were well nourished to begin with for the most part.
for something more stationary, but somewhat similar in spirit, check out this place built right on the ocean on a tropical island in Panama:

www.cocovivo.com
Because sometimes it isn't right for the job? Haskell is absolutely awesome for some things (probably quite a lot of things in fact) but for some other things it's maybe not optimal.

It's a lot of fun though, and if even it does nothing but stretch your mind to some new ways of doing things then it's very much worth learning.
How do they make Gemstone so fast? They have to track every assignment to every persistent object, right? How does Gemstone handle data that doesn't fit in memory?
Quite possibly. However he does seem to have a good friendship with Kevin Rose - albeit, one that is possibly centered around his interest rather than Rose's.

From their recent "podcast demo" (http://vimeo.com/3934635) they did appear to be close.
The best way to handle powerful people is to teach them stuff. That's both interesting for them, and good for the world. It's better not to consciously try to develop relationships with them. Everyone they meet is trying to do that, and they get sick of it.
Same here. I am really not that confident in the value of ebooks. And besides I usually like to read a book before I'd buy it.

But that is just how affiliate marketing comes across to me. And that type of marketing seems to work on some people. So I think that you could probably be very successful with an ebook.

If I really liked the book, and was about to do some traveling, I would definitely buy a print copy. I like physical books a lot more than ebooks. If you don't want to find a publisher, you can self publish it. Lulu.com seems to have a good setup.
I actually had a hard time deciding whether to nominate Stallman or nominate the GPL. Then I realized that the MIT License could also deserve a nomination. But when push comes to shove, if you figure only one representative icon of FOSS might be included in the actual MIT150 exhibition, it seems like it should be Stallman.
Sometimes is a long way from never. The relevant phrase here is "not to program in"; you clearly agree with me that this is a mistaken attitude.
HOPL: an interactive Roster of Programming Languages
It's not git-backed (yet), but if you're interested in something like that check out Ditz (which you can use with GitHub's Pages feature): http://en.deadbeaf.org/2009/04/17/ditz-on-github-page/
The article is (obviously) a joke. But it raises an interesting point about computation (namely, it's a small miracle that practically computable problems are usually those with polynomial time solutions.)
Spain had its share of train terrorist attacks, and at least in the rest of the Europe you can't tell. I don't know about inside Spain, though, but I imagine it's still not much difference.
Organic snacks would be the general category.
True. But we tend to overreact here in the US.
If you are talking frameworks, Amazon is HTML::Mason and is bigger than YouPorn... at least for now. ;)

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/youporn.com+amazon.com/
I can see some merit in those points, but mostly only because computer science as an academic field and the jobs real-world CS majors do are fairly disconnected at the moment. Most of the "50 year old professors" I've met are nowhere near losing touch with the bedrocks of "computer science": information theory, computation and algorithms, etc. But they probably don't know much about the rapidly-changing landscape of Internet technology, and there are good arguments in either direction whether they should.

I know people who've gone the autodidact route in CS and they do just fine, but I do notice it leads to a particular kind of snobbery against higher education because they learned everything online, so why can't everyone? Trouble is, a fairly high fraction of human activities don't lend themselves to that kind of learning. And some of them, like green energy technologies, are even the kinds of things some startups want to get involved in. Higher ed becomes pretty damn necessary in these cases.
World Builder: the Future of Interacting with Holographic Tools - information aesthetics
Important difference: you can't fly a train into a building.

Edit: easily :)
Does an over/under of 65% not guilty sound about right?
Awesome! I was hoping for this for some time. Lighthouse user right now, but putting the two together just makes sense.

I setup a new repository last night and saw an option for "issues" in the settings, so I'm not so surprised but definitely happy :)
Chinese spies may have put chips in US planes
I like GitHub a lot and have been waiting forever to open an account there.

As soon as they get their act together and make every page load in milliseconds as opposed to seconds, we're dumping our own git server.
Using a default configuration, Apache actually maintains a pool of worker child processes which handle the actual request processing, rather than forking on every incoming request. You can allow it to fork more workers under load, or keep it locked down to manage resource usage. You can also configure it to use an alternate MPM (Multi-Processing Module) to use thread pools, fork on each request, or some mix of the above.

The difference in resource usage is due more to the fact that Apache is written to be a sort of generic network service platform, rather than a lean-and-mean HTTP server. It allows plug-in modules (whether written in C, or any of the mod_perl/python/ruby/etc. dynamic language bindings) to interact with just about any stage of request processing. In addition, a default Apache install will usually link a large number of other modules in each worker

That being said, tuning Apache for performance + minimal resource usage is a bit of a black art. If you're not comfortable configuring + building your own server package from source, it's probably easier to just grab Nginx and be done with it.
Time Warner Cable to shelve new Internet pricing plan
I meant "not necessarily to program in". E.g. it's not going to be something you use all the time. The sad fact is that a lot of existing code and companies use fairly safe languages like C and Java, but simply knowing how to think about functional programming will help you out with all your programming, no matter the language.
This solves 80% of Open Source project needs. More robust ticketing ala Lighthouse will still have a place for bigger projects.

Good work Logical Awesome.
It uses it for the pagination, which is both irritating and pointless. The only advantage gained by doing this is speed--and they could have that by making the links go to anchors within the page. This kind of thing is far from rare, but it does make me sad when I see real programmers doing it.
This can be extended beyond the humanities... Science and Engineering graduate schools are under increasing risk as the job possibilities of their output is reduced - reduction in DoD funding, outsourcing/offshoring, reduction in commercial R&D funding, etc.

Yeah, the Boomers' retirement will help, but that's not going to occur in the near term. Countries, somehow, have to be net job creators if they want to keep the tax revenue coming in and the government cash going out.
Do it every chance you get! It's just that you can't always program with a fun functional language.

The hardest part is in collaboration with people who have been using C for 10+ years and aren't interested in other things. Fortunately we have standards for linking object files together independent of their source language.
He is a real value-add investor than most of the angels :) He has sold a company, founded a couple , worked with many startups/incubators etc...
A much more amusing hack would be to write a Twitter client in VBA, so it's not just an Excel lookalike, it IS Excel.
This is something I keep trying to tell people whenever micro-benchmarks appear showing that such-and-such web server handles >5k concurrent connections within a particular memory footprint, or that this-and-that message queue supports 8k enqueue/dequeue ops per second without hitting disk.

How many Rails apps out there can handle more than, say, 200-300 concurrent clients without either pegging the CPU or bringing the database to its knees?

Putting Passenger behind Nginx just removes a need to install + configure Apache for folks who are already use and like Nginx. It may also have some benefit on memory-constrained environments like entry-level VPS hosts.

That being said, I personally think that folks who spend days or weeks tweaking their deployment to run in <256MB of RAM to save a few bucks a month on hosting should probably reevaluate their priorities.
Where are you located? Most git pages (e.g. http://github.com/rails/rails/tree/master or http://github.com/rails/rails/commits/master) should load fast.

That said, we're still working hard to optimize and speed-up every aspect of the site. The dashboard in particular should get a massive speedup soon.
Wired had a nice little article on class D amps:

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/class-d-amplifi.html
Sucks for the GitBug guy that launched just a few days ago
RMS in a museum? The jokes almost write themselves.
National Geographic's Infinite Photograph will mesmerize you
It sounds like you are inventing ways to put yourself above other people. There is no title that guarantees that you do good work. Ovid was a writer, Tolstoy was a writer, James Joyce was a writer, Thomas Pynchon is a writer, and none of them would be offended to be called a writer, even though there are multitudes of talentless scribblers who have never completed a novel (and many talentless scribblers who have completed novels -- so I'm not sure why "novelist" is any better than "writer.")

So why should you be offended at being called a programmer? There are people ignorant enough to think that "programmer" places an upper bound on your talent and accomplishments, but there are also people ignorant enough to think that writing is an easy task that requires no talent. If you want to impress such people, allow me to suggest that you rely on your clothes and hairstyle and just be vague about what you do for a living. Such people will be even more impressed if they think you do nothing at all.
A note to anyone who creates a new programming language: Please put up a quick bite of sample code that shows how your language looks and what it does on the site, and don't require me to download a PDF and search through it.