skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It says a lot about the participants of the "Erlang rush" that neither of these virtually canonical resources were submitted.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569750
Good tips in there but just for SEO I would ignore the table-based layout tip, learn to <div and <ul
I mean, it's not feasible to stop file sharing either, but it hasn't stopped them from trying.
Hey, House MD has got the same lamp in his office as Y-Combinator (and now I want to know where to get one).

It looks like a George Nelson "Saucer."

http://www.ylighting.com/bub-saucer.html
Silly girl! Marketeers stop hyping. Bloggers stop blogging. Troll stop tolling. No more misleading stories driving up eyeballs. Everybody sitting back and being thoughtful? A century ago William Randolph Hearst sold us a war. I dont think anything has changed.
6 Types of Mass Customization
Domaining: The Secrets To An Excellent Money Making Strategy
Very clean and high-level functional optimization techniques and hints. Erlang doesn't seem to have a way to circumvent the compiler for people who REALLY know what they're doing.

We Lispers have high-level optimization guidelines too, sure, but we also have the sort of "feel the bits between your toes stuff", like:

http://common-lisp.net/project/cmucl/doc/cmu-user/

The canonical example is in psuedo C: f(x,y) = (x|y)&(x^y)

See the x86 disassembly output of that in

http://www.cons.org/cmucl/doc/reading-disassembly.html

[Edit: HN doesn't do code snippets, shell output or anything even remotely hackish. I tried the three-spaces-before-a-line trick and it doesn't work. oh well]
This thread is about open source software. My point is that it's easier to differentiate open source software from other open source projects than it is to differentiate a consultancy from other consultancies.

The reason is simple: a customer can try out an open source project for free.
(Posting removed. Responding to the headline...)

I would, but I probably wouldn't work on what you want me to work on...
First, they make a website. This gets them acquainted with HTML and CSS. Then, they make another website, and then another one. Then they discover that Javascript or PHP can make your website 'do stuff'... which essentially means they just got started in programming. Hoorah! :)
This actually reminds me of the part of "In the Beginning Was the Command Line..." where Stephenson points out that more powerful tools are more difficult to use but also give you more control. Using a less smart compiler is harder, but it gives you more control, and is less likely to blow up on you.
It's a step forward for RepRap...but to be cruel, this is like your disabled child learning to use a spoon at age 6.

I love the project a lot; I was friends with one of the founders ~15 years ago, until we got separated by geography. He had an amazing hack/DIY ethic then, and clearly still does - I'm very impressed with what he's achieved.

But as you can see from the RepRap homepage, funding comes from donations, t-shirts and kit sales. Ideologically pure DIY is laudable but we've all seen software projects that were a triumph of individual achievement and a true labor of love, but where v1.0 finally landed with an interface that was >5 years out of date.

The problem at bottom is that RepRap can't do things on a very fine scale, and you can't build a new RepRap from an existing one - you can make bits, but not the motors or the extruder, which are exactly the (relatively) expensive and hard-to-source parts in shortest supply in places like Africa.

Given the increasing quality and affordability of commercial RP and 3d printing machines, it might make a lot more sense to raise a few hundred k or a few million in capital, buy the good commercial stuff, and skip several generations, just as the OLPC was (presumably) designed on the most up-to-date computers available, rather than being bootstrapped on 8086 machines for reasons of ideological purity.

Reprap is a great venture, but it's never going to get there by itself, and the founders are never going to dirty themselves asking for a big check in exchange for any kind of commercial license. It's held back by it's 'techno-Amish' origins.
Doesn't python have this built in? Try "import turtle".
Maybe. I'll be working on my startup on the side.

Requirements:

High speed internet

AC/Heat

Free food

Area for sleeping

Stipend for entertainment
Meet OSRA The Open Source Robotic Arm
I expect "no human drivers permitted on public roads" to be the law because human drivers are fallible. Robots are also fallible, but they tend to accumulate their lessons across entire robot population (at least within one manufacturing company) whereas each new human driver needs to be taught anew. Even well-taught, humans are still prone to errors and it's only a matter of time before standard robot is 10 times safer than 95th percentile of drivers.

The only problem with robots is systemic risk - some sort of common bug (e.g. Y2K) that would take out many machines at once or another thing that fails in a non-graceful manner. Car companies are not strangers to designing proper failure modes so I think it will pan out ok in the end, but software engineers aren't as good at it yet so we do have that risk for a while.
No because that drives substitution where people find substitutes for the material or for the process the material is used for.
It came about for evolutionary purposes, I'm sure, and the magnitude of their influence is quite debatable, and varies greatly from person to person. But do you believe status is not a factor in the eyes of most girls (this is, of course, simply a generalization)?

I'm sure you have friends who you would consider incredibly nice, but very shy, guys who never could get a girlfriend, and plenty of jerky, but confident, guys who you wonder why girls would date. Confident guys, even when not nice, just seem to win out over really nice, but not at all confident, guys. Guys with both win out over both. Whether or not it's a bad thing is your call.

(I'm not arguing guys are above their primitive desires: not by any means, it's just not the focus of this discussion.)
"We will not take any action (to block) the contents if we are not compelled to do so"

In other words, no one with sufficient authority has asked yet.
Or in short, their lack of interest in scaling up limits the hardware's ability to scale down. I talk too much.
The Spot Runner Saga Continues: Founders Accused Of A “Pump And Dump” Scheme
That sounds perfect, thanks!
The goal is for it to be usable by 6-year-olds who have never heard about programming.
I suggest this book as a background on different corp types and in general the corporate goverance: http://www.amazon.com/Corporations-Examples-Explanations/dp/...

you don't have to read the whole book - a few first chapters will suffice.
Back in the day me and my friend ran a clan, playing the PC game called "Unreal Tournament 2004". At first we wanted a simple site to showcase our members, wins, information on the clan.

Then we wanted a way for people to apply for the clan and setup tryout dates. After that we wanted a system to allow other clans to challenge us and schedule games. Then we needed a way to host videos of games we had and let people comment on that.

As the requests and features piled up we went past HTML/CSS and found out about PHP/MySQL... the rest was history. Also, we were 14-15 at the time.
Honestly, don't over think it. Just start marking every single email you know is spam as spam. Occasionally check the spam box and un-spam anything legit. The filters on gmail are really, really good and they learn quickly what to filter and what not. Don't do anything weird or complicated, just hit the spam button.
Me == 50

Twitter.

Is a real time revolution.

Twitter names are the gold rush. You kids better get in there and preserve your spot. This is the best way I have ever seen to build a vertical slice of 30-50 thousand followers, without all the SEO/SEM, PPC, hoopla.

I am running multiple twitter accounts, using auto follow tools, auto content tools, and cannot believe how much traffic to my sites it generates. Better than PPC!!!

2 centavos deposited...
Post names/links please.
How to Tweet at Work Undercover | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Murphy is an unabashed Solaris/Sparc partisan, but he usually makes good points (in past posts, not much data on this one). I appreciate his dissenting from the majority viewpoint - thundering herds are prone to occasionally going off cliffs, as recently demonstrated.

I also believe he's right in thinking Sun is getting a raw deal from 'the street'. Of course, it would help if Sun could sell its way out of a wet paper bag ...
I'm glad we have dead-tree media to remind us of how trivial and narcissistic our online lives are.
I don't think its feasible, but I don't think the people who decided to start suing have realized this quite yet. I doubt these people hold the same beliefs everyone in the organization does, but they are the figureheads and make the decisions. As bad of a strategy as it may be, waiting for a change in leadership might be the best option available.

Also, its just Mac OS X with a lot of icons in the dock.
I had the idea to make some sort of easy to use frontend for turtle(you know, with tutorials and built in functions to easily do more advanced stuff), but unfortunately i don't have the time at this moment. The turtle module is really cool, and I've spent some time playing with it. Hope you guys make something cool.
If this is true, Texas is the China of the USA?
The pro-Bush side encompasses a wide variety of people on the right and I'd swear that some of them thought the left were evil and were shovelling bucketfuls of hate as well. Maybe if you just listened to some of the more civil pundits on the right like David Brooks, William F. Buckley Jr. or George Will then you got a different view.
Are you aware of MakerBot (http://makerbot.com/)? This is exactly the thing they're doing: they've launched a company whose first product is based on reprap.
Sure, it's easy to download Visual Studio Express. But it's hard for a beginner to do cool things with it. .NET has a learning curve and is boring to beginners -- and alas, most Visual Studio stuff is based on .NET.

DirectX takes a lot of code just to get something on screen. Making a Windows forms program in C++ generates a lot of extra code that is confusing.

Back in the old days, no complicated APIs or SDKs were needed to do something exciting like graphics. Just one line of code and you could write a pixel to the screen. Nowadays, to do anything of value you need to know how to use complex APIs.
Drop.io's Sam Lessin on Social Media Hostages
"French Fury"? There's about 20 of them, and they don't look very "furious". I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of lame publicity stunt.

I guess "Small Group Enacts Half-Hearted Protest in Paris" doesn't have quite the same viva la revolucion dramatic ring.
Assuming 200 million active users, 0.14%

(http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)
It does seem that many of the problems are down to short-term views from the "investors" forcing certain courses of action. The evidence does not show that bankers are any better running a computer company than they are running a bank.

(disclosure of bias: my startup runs on Sun + Solaris)
I've been using Aardvark for the past couple of weeks, and I'm sorry to say but it is truly pointless.

Almost all of the questions are specific to the Bay area, and most of them are just people looking for Google-replacements, e.g. "What's the half-life of Uranium-235?". Only a tiny portion are well-worded, opinion-based questions like the system was meant to handle.

Even then, the system does not seem to respect my preferences at all, and continues to send me questions out of my field of expertise or geography (which the system knows), and fails to learn from this constantly.

The only part of Aardvark that impresses me is their uncanny ability to assign categories to submitted questions.

Also, the system does not inspire confidence at all, when it takes a full day to get you two answers to a simple question, and half the time your question goes unanswered. The system suffers horribly from the chicken-and-egg users problem and I don't feel like it's structured to overcome it.
My daughter found a version of turtle graphics linked to by her class's website, and was thrilled to discover she could change the pictures by changing the program. (She's nine.) That's how she got started.
I'd like to see a TI-85 style graphing calculator. Something that has all of the scientific functions, as well as basic 2-D graphing capabilities. I wouldn't need it to be programmable like the TI calculators, though.
I have been trying to work on a treadmill for the last 2 days. The platform shakes, the motor is noisy at low RPMs and so far isn't sustainable for a long period of time.
Ask HN: Thoughts on Downloaded Media with Streaming Advertising?
That's the funny thing: he was speaking Japanese but two of the 3 words he used were borrowed from English.

I guess in the end not having been to Japan and knowing few, if any, people who have gone there and seriously studied the language, it simply sounded impressive to me.
Credit cards are pretty rare in Austria, too. (I blame the banks in part; getting a CC here has been a nightmare for me and has taken over half a year!) Amazon seems to do fine regardless, as they've just adapted to the local idiosyncracies. iTunes seems to solve it with gift vouchers. (the latter presumably being especially useful for kids)

Come to think of it, there must be a substantial market for painless pan-European payment processing. Hmm! Or has this been tried and failed many times before?

In any case, to address the micropayment angle, you could optionally pre-charge your account with a certain amount of credit and slowly use that up. I'm sure this sort of thing could be solved, given enough demand. The problem seem to be the copyright holders, though, so I have little hope.
I read faster than almost anyone I know and the only difference I know is that I don't think aloud the words when I'm reading silently. I'm reading phrases rather than words. I hope you got the idea because I don't know how to convey it. This technique is natural to me and I was surprised initially that a lot of people read silently, the way they read aloud ie word by word.
I am now :-)

and I think their emphasis on low cost and general utility (as opposed to self-reproducibility) will net them more users and $. I've also been following the Desktop Factory, who promise 3 desktop printing for $5k: http://www.desktopfactory.com/ Still vaporware commercially speaking, but ti doesn't hurt that they look a Real Company.

I hope I don't sound too down on the RepRap or on you for posting it. I've got a classic case of the 'introverted total DIY = unfinished project' myself.
This was in 2000-2003. With the gift of hindsight we know now that XML was not the future

Some people at the time tried (un)common-sense. Fortunately they took the trouble to whack the ... erm, "rough edges" out of the fashionable groupthink (e.g. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime... ).

Thanks to them, we now seem on the way to HTML5, which I agree it looks like a good idea.
Well, it's an implementation of the original wiki, but not the same exact implementation the original runs.
I don't have an opinion either way on this Mac/PC thing however I do think that the marketing is quite interesting.

For many years Macs have been portrayed as "cool", with all the "Mac vs Pc" adverts as well as the indirect appeal from the iPod / iTunes advertising.

Microsoft have been quite clever at counteracting this in the new adverts this in my opinion. In their adverts, they're gently nudging the idea that Macs are one step up from cool; the implication is "Macs are elitist" owing to the price differences making a purchase by "real-life people" imposible. Once this implication gets through to the majority of people, this starts to kill the trendiness factor.

Or am I over-analysing it?
You still shouldn't use @import, which is a designer sucking programming. @import can cause FOUC as well as slowing down page render a lot.
JWZ: the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism
Interesting. I used to be a Navy submarine officer, and qualified and ran our boats reactor. Not nearly the size of the plant he's talking about, but lets say that we needed to be able to handle bigger... transients. :)

I'm glad he brought out one of the big points in US/UK nuke plants; the professionalism. It's hard to understand until you've experienced it.
Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft all come to mind. Yahoo and Microsoft for relevance to search, and Amazon as a bookseller. They're all big enough and technically competent enough to do it, in my opinion.
Anybody else started with mIRC Scripting? I did. It was cool to be able to do all sort of things, specially if you were IRCop.

Now that I think about it, every "big" program should come with an embedded scripting language. It will bring a lot of people into programming and it would make life easier for all of us. Imagine if all of the main IM clients had one.
Go to town: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pVbeXYbrC8s2PaPgHSFvp...
The problem back in the day was always documentation and concept-acquisition. To some extent documentation is still a problem, but at least with modern languages a lot of the APIs and data structures for common tasks are sitting at your finger-tips, you don't have to reinvent them, so "throwing something onto the screen" is a faster process, and you usually get much more helpful error messages.

The concepts are still problematic though.
What is this, digg? So what if it's a duplicate? I am here to discuss with fellow HNers as much as for reading interesting articles.

Also, I joined only 133 days ago, long after this article was on the front page.
I don't know if it's "these days" enough but I started programming at age of 9 in 2001, first on some Soviet computers's BASIC, then on 386/486 (they still had those)'s QBasic, then on VB6 in 2002, and then somewhere later in 2002 I found C, and in 2003 I moved to C++ completely as writing something more complex with C than "Hello World" was kind of hard for me:)

Another shift happened when I was 17 (last autumn), as I have discovered LISP and Python and Ruby. With Python and Ruby understood that programming itself can be fun, not just the fact of solving problems with it, and expanded my brain (almost blew it away) with Common LISP, Scheme (call/cc.. yay), and Clojure.
How is Postfix going to help? IMAP and POP3 are mailbox access protocols, not for sending mail (SMTP is for that). I also seriously doubt you could set something up with Postfix that's better than Google's spam filtering solution.
It's good to know about dupes. If nothing else, if you're interested in the article you can read the HN comments on the other page.
Seriously.

Just get yourself a domain, and set it up on Google Apps for your Domain. Result? You now have infinite email addresses.

So, if you're bob@yourdomain.com, you can create a catch-all so that anything@yourdomain.com comes to you. This is actually the most effective spam-fighting mechanism I've found yet.

The trick is to then sign up to things as bob.thing@yourdomain.com. For example, you might sign up to HN as bob.hackernews@yourdomain.com. Then, if you ever get a spam to that email address, you know exactly where it came from. Moreover, if one of those addresses gets sold off to some dodgy email resellers and flooded with semi-legitimate spam that just seems to get through GMail's filters (e.g. if you ever buy a ticket from the scummy spam-loving bastards at TicketMaster), you can just block that specific address while keeping everything else functional.
So many apps are built to be extensible now that I'd say it's still completely normal to fall into programming without any special effort. Remember that in the good ol' days, most kids didn't even have access to a computer. Now, any sufficiently internet-addicted teenager is bound to end up modifying something with plain text -- that's all it takes to get started. There's markup for forums, blogs and wikis, and that standard method for overriding the CSS on your MySpace page that's actually pretty gut-wrenching if you realize what's going on, but still, it's genuine CSS. Most sufficiently involved games have some kind of scripting capability, too. And you don't even need a proper text editor, much less a "development environment", to get started with any of this.

I started out with Geocities and the "View Source" function in Netscape. Amazingly, even now that most of the Web has been tamed and the most popular websites keep most of the interesting code behind the scenes, browsers still have "View Source", web-based rich text editors still have an "Edit HTML" tab, and you can still quickly download all the static components of a public webpage, modify it locally, and load your creation in a browser to see what's different. Compared to the days of Windows 3.1, this is awesome.

Then, consider the built-in interpreters that come with every modern non-Windows OS, package managers for finding and installing free libraries, free online documentation and even complete books on just about everything... if a kid these days can't get started with programming, it's because either they're not interested yet, or they don't realize they're already doing it.
The iLike app looks terrible. What happened to simplicity and non-interference?
I know a bunch of people who got started on TI graphing calculators. That was about 10 years ago now though.
An Island Tech / Coworking Hostel: CocoVivo
Wow, not a single mention of DTrace or ZFS. I believe that these are the best reasons for keeping these projects going.
Yawn yawn yawn. He wants Apps for his favourite Google products and social networks. How unbearably dull and unimaginative; quick quick, I need a link to the top 10 knitting patterns from 1897 to liven things up a bit!

Apps (or WebApps) for the iPhone?

I'd like to write one or see one that would do for cars what Shazzam does for music - photograph a car, it recognises it and tells you what it is. Bonus if it does other forms of transport and near-matches too. Totally useless, thoroughly cool.

One that I've mentioned in almost every post here for ages, a service that I can take a photo, it does OCR and feeds the text into Google translate. Bonus points if it does source-language-detection. More bonus points if it is actually usable in a foreign country on real live things like signposts, menus, timetables, advertisements, book covers, leaflets, etc.

How about some over-the-top cool statistics and analytics for next week's London Marathon and July's Tour de France?

How about a Shazzam-alike for ambient noises? Natural stuff? Wave your phone around and it tells you which birdsong that is, photograph something and it tells you which tree has that shaped leaves, what flower or bird or insect you're looking at. Bonus points if it's in any way accurate.

How about a grass-roots weather data feed? Wave your iPhone about and upload some GPS-specific current weather data to everyone's favourite mapping and mass-data crunching big brother, GOoooooooOOooogle and see if they can compete with the Meterological offices. Google Maps with satellite photo exists, why not Google Maps with live (and predicted) weather info overlay? Bonus points if there's a hardware sensor-array accessory for iPhone 3.

Maybe a city or museum tour guide app - go somewhere and pay to download an audio tour. Better if it can pick up data from where you are and guide you to nearby points of interest, and has photos, videos and text too. Even better if it's not that, but this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789

Some decent mesh/local networking for iPhone 3 would be brilliant as well. Imagine a megaphone where one person could speak but only other people with tuned in networked phones could hear. Cross between a a shared walkie-talkie channel and a very short range radio broadcast.
I hate the media companies so much, I thought it was an article about copyright infringement until I actually read it.