skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody needs some some kindred souls. Finding them can be tough.
But (paraphrasing Gandhi), "Be the future you want to see."
Why not start a "computer club" "programming club"... whatever (if there's not one).

It'll look good on applications to college/job.
And it'll draw to you the type of people who are sympatico...

How are you at explaining things to those slower than yourself?
Maybe you (or your club) could offer some tutoring help to those less fortunate (in brains).
You could set up a facebook or other social site for linking kids needing tutors with those wanting to tutor (whatever subject). Harnessing your gifts to serve in the school will not only give you personal satisfaction but will enhance your social contacts. [And remember: it will also bring you some (unexpected) challenges to help round out your growth.]

--my 2 cents.

Wishing you the best with it!
PayPal took 50k and said if the investors wanted it back in 2 weeks they could take it back. Of course, the investors didn't take it back.
I see the distinction. It's not a blocking call, and can't return a value to the original caller, so it might not be correct to call it recursion. (Also, I'm using "recursion" rather loosely here—as we've seen in the recent Guido-vs-TCO debate, not all tail calls are tail recursion. Often when I'm using this pattern, the function isn't calling itself, but rather some other function, such as an event that fires another event when it's done.)

So, maybe you're suggesting that the name should not include "recursion"? Still, it would be worthwhile to have a name for this pattern, no? What would you call it?
Re: #7 - She could have stolen your heart :'(
Nice, but I don't think this kind of functionality - updating multiple things at once - belongs at the application layer (iPhone or otherwise). API's need to become common enough for you to be able to instruct Twitter to push your tweets to any URL you'd like, using various interfaces.

Seriously guys, this was the original vision of object orientation in Smalltalk. Objects need global URI's, interfaces (protocols, message systems, whatever you want to call them), and the ability to communicate.

These are ideas from the 80's! Get it right already!
Yup, another favorite of mine from linguistics is:

"We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were [adjective]"

What is "they" referring to, and the adjective describing? Well, it depends - "ripe" would describe bananas, "hungry" would describe monkeys. The syntax alone is ambiguous!
That seems like a distinction without a difference. Are you saying Facebook old poll feature wasn't "online?"
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One thing that I see wrong with our current city model

- Big houses with big yards. This makes cities way bigger, expensive to build infraestructure for, and makes us depend on cars.

I bet that, If we all lived on smaller houses our living expenses would be way lower. Has any city tried this?
You're absolutely right, even the earliest days of computer hacking were much more predictable. The difference is like bottom up (electronics) and gray box top down (life).
We're bringing the experience of shopping malls and facebook apps to online stores. Basically, we're trying to make shopping fun and enjoyable rather than the typical errand-driven process that its been for the past 7-8 years.
That's the problem here. The presentation itself may have been tasteless and offensive to some and quite the opposite to others. That's not at issue here.

The issue here is that people who lead by example in the community have completely turned a blind eye to those who were offended. A sincere apology and a few words saying that some attention will be paid towards these things in the future would have sufficed.

The arrogance of the prominent members is what's spreading these flames. They have said publicly that there's no problem here and that those offended should have just left. As Mike pointed out, some more serious stuff was said privately.

So, everyone, please understand. It's not the slides themselves, it's the reaction after the controversy.
Interesting claim that "language designer" == "mastermind." Being great at designing notation for algorithms (which is what languages really are) is conceptually distinct from what most people think of as being a good programmer. It so happens that some language designers have found themselves in that place by virtue of being great programmers (the example that jumps to mind is Dennis Ritchie), but the two coincide less and less often as the field matures, and languages become less of a "systems" problem. At least in academia, the programming language people are perhaps the least likely to ever have to write a line of code in anger.

This gap between coming up with neat notation and the resources need for a world-beating implementation of a language is one of the tragedies of the "dictator-for-life" that has arisen for the "developer productivity" languages (perl, python, ruby...) The language equates in practice with the particular implementation that the designer banged out and maintains. The presence of this reference implementation strangles other implementations in the crib, because users know that libraries, .deb's, new language features, etc., will appear first in the dictator's implementation. Thus, we have datacenters full of nice fast CPUs that spend their lives executing Joe's-favorite-language's switch-on-bytecode VM loop, when they could be running a compiled implementation with more sensible resource usage.
Don't undervalue this advice. I took a good amount, and knocked off a whole semester at college. If I took and tried in every AP class I took, I would've knocked off even more.
That's awesome! I used to launch model rockets in the early 90's at a De Anza College parking lot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...

;-)
"Third, WebKit gets the prize for our favorite JS engine (not surprising with all the Cocoa love being shown)"

Why? WebKit doesn't have much to do with cocoa.
I've never been to Wisconsin, but I rode my bike 7 miles to work (and 7 miles back) for a couple years in upstate NY, including rain and lake-effect snow. Claims of danger and insanity are often exaggerated. With fenders, lights, and proper tires, I never had any trouble with the weather.

I remember riding past rows of houses where people were digging their cars out, or having trouble getting the engine to start. Fun times.
I'm sure this is what browser makers thought when they put in the ability to "pop up" a new window in front of the current one. "Some websites might use it for annoying or nefarious purposes, but the only protection people need is the freedom to not visit sites with popups."

Of course, we've now lived through the truth. Nary a browser can be had without some (imperfect) form of popup blocker built-in to prevent the most egregious nastiness from invading our screens.

Personally, I've never seen an interface that made use of popups in such a way so as to justify their existence. I'd just as soon the feature had never been implemented. If popup ads are something you appreciate, however, I have a counterproposal for you: The only protection you need from "crippled" platforms like the iPhone is the freedom to choose another phone.
And then what is the point of using a Mac? You can do exactly that even from Windows.
Agreed. The other misconception the author points out about FE engineering being just implementing a design rings especially true with me. Just the other day I caught myself thinking: "Oh yeah, let me see your .PSD file make that convoluted AJAX call, Mr. Designer!"
If you're building apps with Cocoa, it's very easy to embed and drive WebKit.
I think New York City has been experimenting with high density housing for a couple centuries now.
You know, the dark entrepreneur in me can't help but feel like all this swine flu craze could be a great opportunity for someone to make some cash.
Ben Fry to present "Computational Information Design" in Northampton, MA
Wish screen-profiles was there in the hardy repository.
I recently had the chance to pick up a pair of Vibram's Five Fingers:

http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/

I saw these shoes about two years ago in ID magazine when the original won a few design awards. Essentially, they are meant to provide a near-barefoot experience while protecting the soles of the feet and providing some traction.

Wearing something like this goes against most of the advice I've received about shoes; as someone with flat feet, I've always sought out shoes with good support, motion-control, etc. However, I find them strangely appealing. Whenever I run/play frisbee on soft surfaces like grass I find it very comfortable to go barefoot. I don't think I've seen enough evidence to be convinced that there is something wrong with common running shoes, but I'm excited to try these anyway.
You can stock up on Indian generic Tamiflu in case of martial law. I'm not sure how you could sell it without getting arrested (or just having it seized). Craigslist probably wouldn't work.

http://www.nicepricepharmacy.com/Products2.asp?ID=3543&T... (this was listed for $79 48 hours ago)
This makes me think it might be easier to get humans to speak a language that computers can understand rather than trying to get computers to understand our current languages :)
If you spent too many years dicking around with Linux you have been doing it the wrong way.
Humility: a sign of experience.
Well, some people are trying to cash in it on it.

For instance, if you look at http://flushirts.spreadshirt.com that's some great dark humor.
Why Isn’t Money Points?
Our developer's group is hosting Ben Fry (of Processing fame) on May 5th. Last year we hosted Rich Hickey (of Clojure fame). Its a nice small setting and worth the drive out to western Mass.
Are there listings for "hackery" events in major cities? I know that can mean one of many things, but I always find out about similar events after the fact.

Here, I mean anything related to programming, hacking, art, visualization, culture, book clubs, etc; ee tend to share similar interests.

Any gatherings you guys can pitch?
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs touches upon this. Somewhere in chapter 4, they implement a nondeterministic interpreter with CPS and then use it to (among other things) find all possible parses of sentences such as these.
School is how you pay for your free time.

When you're an adult you have to take financial risk to pay for time to work for free time to work on what you believe in. When you're a kid, your parents pay the bills and the health industry allows your parents' health insurance to cover to you- you have no financial risk. However, the devil's bargain is that you waste eight hours a day at school. It sucks, so get working on what matters.

You write well and you are clearly smart so you're also smart enough to get the grades you want. Get over yourself and stop looking at it as intellectual stimulation- instead, put in the amount of work necessary to get the grades you require. If you want to go to college, look up the average entrance scores and give yourself enough wiggle room to get in with ease. If you don't want to get in college, just put in the work to pass and push the rest of the time towards learning what it is you want to learn.
> I think it's silly of you to say it's "much more helpful" to "focus more on what is _done_ to the unpopular" when we've all been over that ad nauseam.

When I say it's more helpful to focus on what is done to the unpopular, I am speaking as a parent and an authority figure. And in that position, that focus is well within my locus of control, when it comes to children under my charge. I should have made it more clear that I was speaking from my current point of view.

Furthermore, I spent plenty of time in my youth blaming myself for being beat on, as the author seems to want us to. I assure you, this behavior is also pointless and psychologically damaging. So, to me, there is plenty people can learn from somebody saying "You are not at fault when someone hits you". I am glad you have learned this lesson. But I assure you that not everyone has.
The phrase "Time flies like an arrow" is another example. "Time flies" could be a type of insect with an affinity for a particular arrow (or each for its own arrow), or you might be being instructed to measure a fly's speed in the manner that one measures that of an arrow (or to time only those flies that resemble an arrow), or it could have the conventional metaphorical meaning.

cf. "Fruit flies like a banana."
You're in Baltimore too? Cool! I always thought I lived in a vacuum of hackery activity.

edit: To stay on topic, I bike to work sometimes and know of a few great bike trails around Baltimore if you're interested. As far as commuting in the city goes, yeah, you're S.O.L.
It´s a great marketing opportunity for antivirus companies.
They could give away mouthpieces ...
Everybody is wearing them over here (mexico city).
>> Of course, talking to the creator of Lisp would be tricky.

Huh, McCarthy lives according to Wikipedia. Doesn't he give interviews?
Opera turns 15, claims title of oldest extant browser (hey, what about Lynx?)
Sorry, haven't had much blog traffic before and hadn't checked to make sure WordPress caching was on. Should be up now.
Regulation and spending are orthogonal concepts. Your link does nothing to address the question.
I was wondering, why are there no google ads on the swine flu search term:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=swine+flu&btnG=...

is this not a reliable way to tell if there are ads or not? or is it that not enough ads have been bought?
Do yourself a favor and don't go looking for the pictures mentioned in the article. i saw them a while back and I wish that I didn't...
Rheotomic Surfaces
What if you need the upgraded functionality?
That is just plain awesome. This is the type of Hacker/Tweaker/Discoverer attitude that makes me smile from ear to ear.
As such, you may find examples of "brokenness" in the YouTube app (doesn't remember your position in a video), in the Calendar app (if you quit while typing a note for a calendar event the note gets obliterated) and, to give an example of a third-party app, in the Apple Design Award-winning OmniFocus (same thing as the Calendar app). I personally balk at saying "the end" to YouTube, iCal and OmniFocus.
You can buy 8x4 white panelboard at Lowes or Home Depot for about $15 a panel. The surface can get burned off if you use some caustic cleaners but it's cheap to replace.

http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productDetail&prod...
The problem is that in a biology lab, there's a lot more behind the materials and the tools than there is behind source code, and stuff isn't as neatly parameterized. Just from high school biology I can name three different ways to create a vaccine for a virus, and checking my knowledge on Wikipedia reveals a bunch more. Yet there are still many viruses we can't vaccinate against. Stuff in biology is incredibly complex and specific. Adapting a successful technique to a very slightly different situation can be straightforward, or it can be a major research project. You could easily pick, as your first "original" project, something that would require a scientific breakthrough to accomplish, and it would take you years to advance to the point of even realizing it. If that sounds rewarding to you, you're probably already professionally involved in an intellectual field deeply enough that you want your hobbies to have entirely different rewards and challenges.

Feynman's memoirs are some of the most intellectually macho posturing I've ever read, and even he stuck mostly to physics when he was doing physics. He favored hobbies like safecracking, drumming, and drawing, all of which could be summed up as showing off and getting laid. People looking for a professional-level intellectual challenge from their hobbies are in the wrong line of work.
I just use the twitter facebook app.

Although I do like the way it is called up.
It's mostly true. But it also means programming languages attract certain kinds of programmers, a language that fits their individual differences. The reason I moved to Lisp is simple. I was tired of syntax. I was tired of the language straight jacket. I'm always surprised that these things never bother other programmers. It surprises me even more that programmers tediously compare the features of their language when any non-trivial program means a large API (that is a language on top of another language). Once you realize that, who really cares about language features? What you want is something malleable. You want something that can program the program. You want (as has been said elsewhere) a language for growing languages. Instead of wasting time learning about each language's arcane meta programming facilities- learn how to write macros, and you can have all the meta programming facilities you'll ever need. But this doesn't seem to interest most programmers, I guess that's part of the individual difference thing.
Tamiflu et al. manufacturers are probably ramping up production as we speak.
Well, you could of course change the context. If we glom "We didn't give the rhinoceroces anything because they weren't ripe for a feeding, but ..." onto the front of your sentence then "ripe" starts to apply to the monkeys.
This isnt about sexual hangups. It's about respect for others in the workplace and similar venues. Most HNers are to young to know what it was like for a woman a few decades back where propositions, sex for promotions, and the like were common. Talk to some women in their 50's about what it was like when they first entered the workforce. It seems alien to us technical types, because we are pretty respectful of others, at least in person. The outrage is there because an awful lot of us dont want any backsliding, not because we are prudes.
We do not have a Wikipedia article, yet.

Who's ready to prove notability?
The stress adds information. #2 is the basic meaning (it is true for all of the others as well), a stress on any other word adds information about what you did way/imply.

Incidentally, some still bear alternative interpretations: e.g., #3 could be interpreted as "I only thought it".
Most of the comments seem to being suggestions on how to make conforming easier. That is a great way to go if the original poster wants to grow up to be a really kick ass employee / soldier / middle manager, etc.

Dropping out of high school was one of the best things I have ever done with my life. Not because I was too smart or too anti-social, etc. I just wanted to do other things. So I did.

If you focus on growing and learning then you can take whatever path you want. It is riskier and scarier, but I think it is worth it.

I am 31 years old and I have lived a great and varied life so far. I was a pastry chef at a fine dining restaurant, a social organizer working with non-profits, a high school teacher, a startup programmer, a BI consultant, and more. Now I own a couple of retail franchises work on my own startup and play with my kids.

If you have the drive and guts to take the road less traveled, I say go for it. Dropping out is not just for losers.
"The issue here is that people who lead by example in the community have completely turned a blind eye to those who were offended. "

It is probably just me, but I hate these kind of group think coercion efforts.

Maybe (just as a thought experiment, bear with me before reaching for that downvote button) are there circumstances in which "turning a blind eye to those who were offended." is the right thing to do? Just think about it for a few seconds.

I am not sure anyone has a right not to be offended. Let me repeat that. No one has the right to insist that other people live in such a manner as not to give them the slightest offense..

If some of the people involved genuinely felt that "there is no problem" and other people say that "no there is a problem", and there is no consensus, then the best that can be done is to say, ok folks, each of you act according to what you think is right (and suffer any consequences therefrom) and we'll see who prevails.

"A sincere apology and a few words saying that some attention will be paid towards these things in the future would have sufficed."

This assumes that the apology needs to be made at all.
For the apology to be "sincere" the person who is supposed to apologize has to feel he has done something wrong, and more importantly care that other people got offended.

DHH for one obviously doesn't care what other people think, and I respect the man for being consistent in his beliefs and not backing down before people trying to lay some pc guilt trip on him.

I am just a little wary of the "no one should be offended in any manner" idea.

In the end, this is open source software. "Shut up and write code" is probably more useful advice than all this political correctness laden hand wringing.

If people who didn't like the talk had just walked out, no one would know or care if some guy somewhere made some off kilter presentation. The "people who lead by example in the community" are as or more intelligent than the whiners and are just as free to make up their minds on whether to give any credence to the complaints or not. Some of the "leaders by example" seem to have concluded that they don't accept the validity of the complaints. So what? Don't they have the right to do so?

If someone doesn't like the way Rails framework or "community" is progressing, they can fork it. Stop submitting patches or features. Don't use it. Write an alternative framework, possibly in another language. Just don't whine for blog post after blog post on what other people should do to conform to your notions of what is right. You wouldn't like it if other people forced their notions of what was right on to you and forced you to apologize when you think there is no reason to do so.

Ok Thought Experiment over. Back to normal programming (pun intended).

I just thought examining both sides of the issue is important.
I ride a ChargerBike to work on nice days. It's a pedelec-style, in that it measures your torque input and matches (or multiplies) it with electric power, so there's no throttle (the article is talking about a twist-throttle system).

I probably wouldn't have chosen it except that repossessed it from my dad after he never rode it and I didn't want to add a bunch of road/commuting bits to my mountain bike. I originally gave it to him because I was able to get it for cost as an employee at the outfit that made the electronics (AeroVironment).

The advantage of an ebike is basically that it lets you get somewhere faster than you could on a regular bike with the same effort, while retaining all of the advantages in terms of parking and portability. It costs more than the heavy bike it's built on, but is faster than a comparably-priced lightweight bike.

The electricity is basically rounding error on my monthly bill, and it's free when I charge at work.

And while I'm a big believer in the sort of utilitarian fitness you describe, on well-to-wheels basis an ebiker is arguably more efficient than a conventional cyclist eating a typical western diet.
Alright. Emotions flared up on both sides of the issue, so it's probably best to just forget about the whole thing. Thanks for explaining your stance.
Garden path sentences along with other linguistic puzzles are awesome (and this little puzzle is the reason why Noam Chomsky and other linguists can all be cultural critics):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
Come in Wingman? (on failing fast)