skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good points, it does seem a little outrageous people can go to jail for not paying their TV tax, however I guess it has to have some punishment for not paying it, else who would? :D
To except is human; to handle is divine.
Unix To PowerShell – Factor
I don't think there is a "one size fits all" answer. A grid based layout may work best for the big screen and you are probably best off with custom layouts for each major phone platform. Life sucks ;)
In the Windows world? Yes. By no coincidence whatsoever: Windows customers have been trained to this behavior, over decades, by Microsoft and Moore's Law.

Microsoft thrives when people buy new PC hardware, because the easiest way to acquire a customer for a new Windows license is to bundle that license with every PC sold. [1] And Moore's Law provided great leaps in processing speed every year or so. So there was never any incentive to save on resources. Quite the contrary: A Windows release which pushed the envelope of compatibility with current hardware encouraged fence-sitting users to bite the bullet and buy a new PC -- with a new Windows license -- rather than watch their apps gradually slow down or become incompatible as app developers gradually introduced features of the new Windows into their codebases.

Among other things, think of it as a subtle form of copy protection. Back in 2001, you could buy one copy of Windows XP and install it on all of your Win98 boxes. But it would run like crap. Better to just buy some new boxes -- each of which comes bundled with a copy of XP.

Of course, once PCs and Windows became "good enough" the whole strategy fell apart. We seem to be in that world now. The new rage in consumer computing is netbooks and smartphones -- machines that deliberately throw away performance in exchange for other useful characteristics like "cheapness" or "lightness" or "low power consumption".

---

[1] For years it was nigh-impossible to get a company like Dell to sell you a PC without a Windows license included. Linux users complained and fought for years over this "Microsoft tax". For all I know, this is still a problem.
Because you and I are involuntarily among those investors.
It'd have to be a lot slower for me to stand things like this in the code:

e.innerHTML = "Hello &amp; world, here's some HTML &lt;span&gt;Some html&lt;/span&gt;";

over

e.nodeValue = "Hello & world, here's some HTML <span>Some html</span>";

Also you better be 100% sure you're data is 'safe' if you use innerHTML.
eg

e.innerHTML = "Hello "+some_user_provided_data+"!";
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass. (alma mater of a handful of YC team members) has taken several of these ideas to heart.

http://www.olin.edu

No tenure, collaboration with nearby institutions to share courses, encouragement for all community members to contribute to developing and changing all aspects of the college at any time, and no separated academic departments. The list goes on and on.

It's a great place for entrepreneurially-minded students to find an atmosphere that allows them to build up their skills without having to settle for university-level bureaucracy.
Posting links to a site that requires registration to read is not only a bad habit, but also an expression of impoliteness to the overall community and chauvinism. I'm not going to read HN if it makes me register on myriads of other web sites I find useless and pointless for me, which also do not support OpenID.
lo-tech Van Eck Phreaking, it seems
At least in that space at such a low level, there are many existing products people could choose to use if they wanted to. There are no existing free open source projects that solve this problem (and there are other problems where market forces seem to prevent a good common solution from coming about.)

So if you are a C/C++ programmer you have the option to use someone else's low level data structure implementation you can use the STL or tons of open source projects (GLib, Boost).

But just as programmer's love to avoid work and re-use code, they also love to reinvent the wheel which we are all free to do. However, if you were a start-up founder and you insisted on reimplementing low level data structure libraries for your product I don't think your company would last long (unless that is your hobby.)
No, it doesn't. The Rails community does tend to exaggerate a bit. I do think that good points have been raised about the issue of sexism in the Rails community and IT industry in general. That's something that people have been missing.

It's not just about this presentation. The only purpose this presentation serves is to illuminate that larger issue, and that's something that the whole industry needs to take a long, hard look at.
As usual, this guy drones on and on for a long time while trying to make a point and fails to ever make it because his frustration and anger get in the way.

He's a wordy complainer. Thats all, folks.
> you have to jump into the world of blogging and Twitter and Facebook.

The entire article hinges around this point. Your business -MUST- use Facebook/Twitter/"Social Media". The article then goes on to point a dozen examples of companies that were successful with nothing related to social media.

The day you see "Company X increased their sales by their Social Media presence" is the day Facebook & Twitter become profitable.
Not just a Rails problem, sadly.

See the discussion "How to Give a VC a Hard-on". Which got, hmm, 44 people to upvote it here?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526518

I'll stop before I commit unintentional feminism and they take away Vast Right Wing Conspiracy card.
He forgot "use strict;". And now OO Perl programming is better done with Moose/Mouse or even MooseX::Declare.
These ancient, unsupported apps aren't things like spread sheets and word processors, they're industry specific applications. They're much more expensive to create and update (and buy) because of limited demand, and there's often little choice in what software a company can use.

I've been working on a project to upgrade a old DOS based industry specific app to a "modern" browser app. There are still people using the DOS based version, and our main client for the browser app is still using Windows 2000 and IE 6.
I loathe state media. The idea that the government runs media is very 1984. And they don't work for free, they just make money by forcing you to pay at gunpoint instead.

They are not neutral (which is impossible) so there are certain ideas that they promote in their reporting. And even people who are against those ideas are forced to pay for the promotion of those ideas.
Although not specific for Python (it is xml based), I find FusionCharts (http://www.fusioncharts.com/) the best of the breed
One of the great things about the market model is decentralized choice. Nobody has to decide what choices are offered for everybody. That decision is between the consumers and the producers.

And private school voucher programs that currently exist cost as little as 25% of the cost of educating that same child in public school.
we need larry flynt back !
Time Magazine Throws Up Its Hands As It Gets Pwned By 4Chan
We all love to think of ourselves as rebels.
I have heard that you have to jump through some pretty annoying hoops to prove that you don't have a TV. Since the government just assumes that you actually have one and just don't want to pay.
Excellent point, perhaps the larger issue might be that porn is more prevalent in today's day and age:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7

http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Porn+becomes+cultu...

What made me roll my eyes while flipping through the presentation was the "in your face" attitude of inserting the images in the presentation to make a point. To me, the imagery exuded a certain lack of self confidence, but then again - big f'ing deal...it's not how I would get my point across. I see the insertion of the images as being a poor design choice and something that is not reflective of the larger community as a whole.
Invention Success Rates
It's the chicken and the egg problem. Right now I can't name a single US consumer ISP using IPv6. If I update my edge routers, all my firewalls, dns, and all my servers to support IPv6, what have I gained? No users will use it to access my site, and now I'll have to use unmemorably long addresses in all my equipment. No thank you..

Right now, for me and many others, IPv4 addresses running out is someone else's problem. It doesn't affect me, so I feel no need to switch until I'm forced.

Am I missing something? Is there some cool new feature of IPv6 that's worth upgrading for?
"Thats all, folks"

Except that's not all. Ruby and Rails now have a bad reputation, and this bad reputation has an adverse effect on people and companies adopting and continuing with the language and frameworks. It is extremely unfortunate that vocal and influential ruby developers ignore this.
I think Matt chose the that theme for the same reason the author chose to play the Zed card -- it was sure to make a splash.

I have never met Matt, but I know him through several open source projects, and I have watched him answer question after question-day after day-to anyone and everyone looking for help on irc. It really grinds my gears when people talk about throwing him under the bus b/c he pushed it a little too far in one presentation. And it's unprofessional.
Instead of posting some Twitter rumor crap, how about doing a news.google.com search and finding out the actual news:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124084127590859371.html?mod=...
I tried it out, using a few of the couch DB interfaces a couple months ago. I'd say it's not ready for prime time yet except in cases where couchdb's model makes so much more sense for your data you're willing to go through a lot more pain to use it.

In most cases where an RDBMS makes less sense it's usually the case that all the RDBMS oriented sugar rails has acquired still makes it easier to work with an RDBMS.
DPCI Celebrates its 10 Year Anniversary
How much is watching TV costing you?
How to make it to the corner office
You clearly didn't read this post very carefully. Every example he cited was one where "Company X increased their sales through social media". Now, we can debate whether or not the increase was actually due to social media, which is a valid question, as social media ROI is still hard to measure. But it's pretty clear to me that the author's point was well-supported by thoughtful examples of companies who had strong reason to believe that was the case.

I'll throw it another one that he didn't mention: Dell, who has said they've done millions in business through their Twitter efforts.
The place where I work was sent a payment notice (we don't have any TVs there). There was a strict instruction that failure to respond was a terribel thing and bad things would happen to us. There were lots of ways to respond if you wanted to pay or wanted to claim you already had a license.

There was no way to tell them you didn't need a license.

The next step is [they say in the letter] that they send an enforcement officer to your address.

If they just had a general phone number or a "we don't have a TV" phone number they'd have saved themselves at least the cost of sending someone out to try and hassle us ... and I'm sure a lot of other people.

It's not my job to chase up their failure to provide contact details on a demand for money.

OT: We got a parking fine when I took my wife in to have our baby last week. The number to call to pay the fine is the wrong number ... gah! I'm just not sure if this is malevolence.
Would you agree that anti-Israel opinions are not anti-Semitic opinions any more than anti-Pakistan opinions are anti-Islam opinions?
Rubbermaid increased sales through customer reviews on their website.

Fog Creek establishes authority by having a well-received programming/business blog.

Nike has an online custom shoe store.

Zappos is big. Zappos is fanatical about customer service. Zappos uses Twitter as one small channel of their customer service initiative.

Marketing.FM has a blog.

If the article was about how blogs and customer service are good for business, it would have hit the mark. But I'm missing where Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious fit in to those examples.
Are there any actual... benchmarks out there? That might be a good way of looking at the issue in a more objective way.
We've already had this discussion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579401
Dataflow: Erlang-Style Thread Safety in Ruby
If you and I truly cared we'd be in DC with torches and pitchforks. I haven't even bothered sending an email to my rep/sen.
haml 2.2 has universal interpolation and when you put that together with say a markdown filter, writing your paragraphs of text in haml should be a breeze.
You have to jump through hoops to convince them you don't have a TV, and they'll keep sending you letters asking for money. But, if you don't have a TV, just don't pay. They never force you to pay, and the onus is on them (I believe) to demonstrate you have a TV before they fine you.
This research seems to indicate that ADHD is actually a feature of childhood, rather than a bug to be fixed.
Not really...

They send you a letter asking you to pay and you send it back saying you don't have a TV. That's all I had to do.

They'll probably ask me again in a few years, I suppose.
Installing erlang on windows
Just posted online:
http://videolectures.net/cikm08_blank_tshosv/
* Italy buries first quake victims
* Romania blamed over Moldova riots
* Ten arrested in UK anti-terrorism raids
* Villagers hurt in West Bank clash
* Mass Thai protest over leadership
* Iran accuses journalist of spying

2 of those are poor for one of the criteria given IMO.

* West Bank clash, villagers hurt
* UK anti-terrorism raids, ten arrested

These front-load the headlines better so that if you know you don't like "West Bank" articles you can skip the other ~20 characters and jump to the next line. I don't think they are less readable either.

I have to confess I lengthened a headline from "Spiders reanimated" to "Spider Nightmare: Spiders resurrected from the dead" the other day ( http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_re... ).. it felt so dirty and multiply redundant, and didn't get me any Diggs as National Geographic pipped me by 14 minutes with the story.
I tried. If my screencast didn't convey that information, I failed. Did you watch it?
* But alas, such a job does not exist. *

Not sure if this is truly relevant, but Dekalb County in Georgia has a CEO position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Jones
Ask HN: Why has the site been so slow lately?
It makes commenting and what not a bit tedious.
Reminds me very much of the recent "copying keys from photos" story:

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release....
LOL. Funniest thing I have read in a while. Would be funnier if it weren't true that the retarded postmodernist pussies in certain academic departments actually do think along those lines...
It becomes reflective on the community only over time if it is repeated and no one objects.
Nothing against... no wait, I do have something against all of 4chan. It's f'ing pointless at best.

So why is this 4chan rulez time.com thing so often so high on HN?

Within hours today there's several stories about it and that's in addition to all the stories we had here when it started. We're as bad about his as the mass media is about swine flu.

Please, if you're one of the people submitting and/or voting this up, tell me what makes you so interested in 4chan and their Colbert style mockery of online polling?
So what he's saying is that startup mentality won world war two.
When I returned to the UK I simply wrote the TV licensing authority a letter telling them I didn't have a TV. They replied with a menacing letter claiming that I probably didn't realize that I did have a TV somewhere hidden in the house (in the form of some sort of TV receiver).

They then sent me that letter again. I guess the first letter was meant to scare me into paying under the assumption that I had lied.

Then they sent me a letter saying that they would pop round at any time of their choosing and check up on me. They have not yet done so, and if they do they are not coming in. It's a private property and they'll have to get a search warrant (which means going to a magistrate) if they think I'm watching TV.
But if you stop writing open soure code in favour of closed source, you're no longer part of that market. It's more like two different markets (one pays with reputation, one with money or something like that) that are competing for a limited resource - developer time.

So I'd say that there is a market, but it's on another level.
This view is mistaken:

http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/WhyAntiInt.htm
What is interesting is that most people seem to be using SRS for learning languages.

Also, I'm mystified as to why people would pay for anything similar (see http://fullrecall.com/), given that

1. The algorithm being used is freely available "SuperMemo2"
2. Most facts/languages are freely available.

[I'm new here. hurrah]
Love, Hate, C++ and Complexity
The reddit comment sums this up nicely:

"If you’re a Rails programmer, or a Ruby programmer, and you don’t decry this sort of thing, you have no business calling yourself a professional. It doesn’t matter how large your website is, how easy it was to write, how much better it is over PHP or ASP.NET or J2EE; by definition, you do not belong to a professional community. That’s all there is to it. It’s incumbent on every Ruby programmer to either reject this sort of misogynistic sewage, or accept that you’re never going to advance the promotion of Rails in the public perception because members of the community still think it’s edgy or cool to put pictures of strippers in their public presentations. And here’s a hint: if your decided reaction is to talk about how unimportant this is, how much it doesn’t matter, or how much it doesn’t offend you personally, you probably don’t understand professionalism at all."

> "[Matt] had no idea [the pictures he used] are problematic in anyone’s book"

That's completely ridiculous. How old is this guy and has he ever had a job? There is something terribly wrong with education if professional interaction and respect are not getting passed on.
The phrase often attributed to the water problem is

"Water flows uphill towards the highest concentration of money"
Designing a 3D API for the browser
Mnemosyne has quite a bit of content, though the quality can be spotty at times:
http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/downloads/cards.php

Ideally you would want a system (and a license) that allows submitting corrections and updates to the cards.
Manually adjusting the ragged edge of text on the web seems like silly advice to me. In print, sure, it makes sense because you have absolute control over everything. But with variable screen sizes, fonts and display devices used for viewing web content, I don't see the point in manually tuning text spacing when the chances are good others will see different spacing.
I think it would be more accurate to say that what won WWII (in Europe, at least) was the Red Army. The best thing that happened to occupied Western Europe was the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Let us show some respect for the millions of Russians who died fighting the Nazis...
It breaks if you resize the page text in browser (Ctrl++), before stating the video, and shows you how the overlay fits over the page.
No, its a political problem because it is a money issue not a technology issue.

We can have infinite water if we have nuclear powered reactors running massive desalination plants on the coasts with big pumps pushing it through huge pipes to anywhere you need it.

At the minimum -

- But we can't get past political opposition to nuclear power

- Not in my bad yard! (Desalination plant * nuclear)

- Who is forced to have the pipe run under their home (plus eminent domain issues)

- Are the states paying for it? The federal government?

- Why should I subsidize the people living in the dessert?
I was admitted but at the time it was very new, I really wish I had went
http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html

As I posted :/ just click on the buttons and it'll test in your browser.
This is blogspam. Here's the original article: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/operating-system-int...

And the original HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512846
Not to mention they forgot one: Apollo Domain/OS:
http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/apollo-dm.gif (1981)
Actinic Express Review 
Actinic Express is an extremely useful tool for young entrepreneurs who have passed the first stage in planning out what is going to be sold on the site and have a domain name already set up, all paid for in advance. Now, all online entrepreneurs want to have a solid, well designed site in their hands. However, I personally think that as much as the design matters, the payment refinement system so that the customer can feel safe when ordering the specified product, which is just one of the features that the Actinic Express package contains.

Surprisingly enough, Actinic Express authorizes you to use the package through a normal web browser, via the online portal that is provided meaning you can manage all the product payments and be in contact with clients from anywhere in the world...
Building commercial Haskell applications
One Internet Village, Divided: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit
Opportunities for radical innovation in media
Against Readings
I am not weighing in on the original matter, I have not seen the presentation, and living in the United States, I'm very aware that the level of prudishness in this country means one person's porn is another person's string bikini.

However, where the author completely loses me is when he clearly says (to paraphrase), "if it offends anyone, don't do it".

That's wrong. Trying to please everyone will constantly keep you trapped in a cycle of mediocrity. Being entrapped and essentially enslaved by the most conservative members of a professional group or the public at large is utterly stupid.

Even the example given, taking off shoes to go into a temple, is marginally appropriate at best. By going into that temple, you've decided to enter the zone of another culture, you are on their turf. It's basic decency to remove your shoes.

By going to 4chan, you've also entered another zone. Prepare for teenage boys trying their best to wank all over your screen, but don't complain about it. Teenage boys are teenage boys.

By going to a rails conference, you most certainly are entering a cultural zone too, and you sure as hell better have your hazmat suit on. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned here, but that lesson is not in this article, this article just wants to homogenize everything.
It's often said that it becomes very difficult for children to become fluent in another language after a certain age (some say 7, some say 12) - Regardless, as someone who has tried off/on foreign language study, the experience is humbling.

I wonder if babies and young children can acquire language quicker simply because their brain is optimally tuned for maximum language learning (e.g. if they hear a word they might not just be thinking of the meaning but the emotional context, what it means to them, improving recall or if they learn a word, they intuitively understand the concept behind the word because they learned the world for the first-time in the real context [e.g. 'fork' in kitchen]).

I dream about a virtual reality add-on that would let you roam outside in the real-world and it would augment your reality - through pop-ups of the Spanish/French whatever word for objects that you see. As one of my Spanish tutors told me, the key to learning vocabulary is to be able to associate the concept of the word with the word (in whichever language).
I disagree. It becomes reflective on the community if people focus on the small minority of people doing this. This is the same type of thing other groups around the world face where a small group gains a lot of attention and judgments are passed on the larger group as a whole.