skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been to so many conferences and trade shows that I've long ago lost count. JSConf2009 was, without a doubt, the best organized, best agenda, best venue (for the conference), best speakers, best spouse program, . . . I don't know where to stop.

Just the absolute best.
Hint: Some people believe Lisp was a discovery, not an invention.
Find something inconspicuous to work on during your classes. For me, this was usually math teasers of the sort you might find at a math competition. Copy some down, work on what you can. There are a lot of forums online that provide questions of all different levels of difficulty and all levels of accessibility. (I have unfortunately lost the link, but there is a particularly good site that tends toward puzzles that require little more than simple probability and logic.)
I don't agree at all with deletionist philosophy. I want that ended myself.

But the arguments typically center around the mission of Wikipedia. If the organization has to fund storage, bandwidth, etc, then they'd like it to be worthwhile content .

In other words, people argue that it's simply not Wikipedia's mission or charter to document every trivial fact. It's meant to be a reference for "important" and "notable" things.

To reiterate, I don't agree with this. I would actually donate more than I already do to Wikipedia if they changed their policy and were less deletionist. I would like to see more "underground" topics covered on Wikipedia that they delete quickly.
"With another name (Programmer News? Coder News?) we could have a more mainstream presence."

But isn't "mainstream presence" a bug and not a feature? e.g. PG has explicitly stated that he wants HN to remain small and focused.
Against Insect Plague, Nevadans Wield Ultimate Weapon: Hard Rock
Heck no. Check out the hgsubversion plugin for HG. It is getting pretty close to seamlessly hiding SVN as a parent of an HG clone. I've been using it for a few months on a large project (ca. 450k LOC, 8 years of history). You "hg clone svn+http://..." and then you can hg pull/push like normal. I haven't tried any major cross-branch merging -- I still do that in SVN at the moment -- but it works really well. I've got an HG SVN clone on my desktop at work, and a clone of that on my laptop.

I don't know about the HG/CVS possibilities, but I wouldn't be worried about DVCSes.

And, on an unrelated note, I'm really happy about Google's decision. I evaluated git a while ago, and I found it kludgy and awkward. A revision control system should stay out of my way and be a useful tool, not become a full-time job with an equivalent learning curve.
Welcome to the vicious world of corporate name-creation
Yeah, this stuff is done with what basically amounts to an annotated typed logic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)
This person has been spamming HN with article links for at least a week now. Although they're quick to be deleted, I wish pg would ban the site (or user) already.
This applies to many other languages. I can translate all this to Russian and this phenomenon will hold: "Я не говорил что она украла у меня деньги" -- the same 7 meanings depending on stress.
How is ANY of this relevant to Rails, though? Of course he has the right to say what he wants and think how he wants to think, but why does that need to come anywhere near a presentation on Rails?

I like to play the piano, but I'm not going to bust out a keyboard in the middle of a team meeting. Not because it is inappropriate, but because it is completely off-topic, a distraction, and a waste of time.

It's irrelevant, so I have to conclude that it was used to provoke a reaction.

This is what makes forking such a ridiculous notion, if we are going to fork for every ideological disagreement, it will die the same death denominational churches are dying today. When you fork on something that doesn't matter to your common goal, everyone fails.
China's Google Maps (zoom out for best effect)
CDC also has a twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/cdcemergency
Why hi5 Might Have an Edge on Facebook
They are currenly thinking about using the submarine to tow the barge with the rocket from Copenhagen to the North Sea, and just getting that journey approved is a huge problem. The department of defense seems to have a negative opinion about a submarine towing a huge rocket through Danish territorial waters :-)

There are many obstacles like that.
I want something like this where you can type in the request body.
I would argue that Hacker News is at least as notable as Digg or Reddit.

In other words, absolute notability may be hard to establish, but in this case relative notability is a cinch.
We're asking the browser vendors to expose their right-click events to plugins, to provide an API to opening up in a new tab, to open up their cookie preferences so that plugins can integrate user choice, etc.

There's no need to reflexively push back against Flash. You can learn it. You're not left out. You can open up.

jd/adobe
Drop out. I did the same thing at your age, best decision I ever made.
He's playing the role of the technical guy, and to some extent, the blogger, in those roles. He's certainly not assembling all the other pieces of the puzzle in any of them.
In large cities, you're still surrounded by many peers. While they may be harder to interact with due to distances, you'll likely also have the means to reach them relatively easily (car, public transportation). Tech meetups are really easy to find in nearly all large cities.

Of course, there are more responsibilities (the changing diapers at night part) when you're older, but more freedom (no parents that are cramping your style). I say these things with my own time struggle as I try overcome the cubicle by day and masters degree classwork by night. I really do miss the college student schedule with relatively low amount of time in class and a lot of freedom and flexibility in setting my day-to-day schedule.
That is certainly the biggest hole in his idea, so far.
The Age of Viral Feedback
$DISPLAY should be the same, but $SESSION_MANAGER would change.
There was a way to squeeze expectancy out of the craze, but with high risk.

When the NZD and AUD tanked because of swine flu scares, there was no reason for that to happen over a single-digit number of cases of what appears to be a run-of-the-mill illness, except for an unexplained cluster of cases in Mexico (and it's likely that the reason for this is that there are hundreds of thousands of MX cases and we're only discovering the worst ones). Although Australia and New Zealand could get hammered by this, there's no reason to suspect that they'll be affected disproportionately to the rest of the world. A person trading against those irrational market swings could have made money.

Of course, the caveat is that speculation is inherently risky, human foolishness can outlive your wallet (e.g. you can get margin-called before a bubble or wrong market swing reverses itself), and there could have been other reasons for the currencies to react as they did.
Email Reply Behaviors
Hmm, strange. This doesn't seem to work @ my google. I just get normal search results... Might not have propagated between servers or maybe this is a localized service only available in the U.S. ?
Glad you like it. The new Text Layout Framework does a whole lot more too... it brings the classic Adobe digital-text expertise right into 98% of the world's current browsers.

Veronique Brossier has a good intro to it all:
http://www.insideria.com/2009/03/flash-text-engine.html

More examples & info:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/

jd/adobe
Mainstream presence is the last thing I want to see. Sorry to be an elitist about it, but I hang out here to get away from the mainstream.
Quite an interesting article.

I certainly don't wish to turn my nose at the Cloud, but as this article points out, there are downsides to everything. The thing that has been bothering me the most is that for the first time, I have handed someone else the power to massively waste my time.

Let me explain. If I click "upgrade" on a kubuntu box right now, my KDE 3 turns into KDE 4. If I don't want KDE 4 (I don't like it, or I don't have time to set up and familiarise myself with a new desktop paradigm) I can choose not to push the button.

If Nintendo go bankrupt tomorrow and disappear off the face of the world, I can still play Age of Empires on my DS.

As a counterexample, after setting myself a nice little workflow using Google Notebook, Google decided they didn't care about Notebook anymore. I could not choose to keep using it. Google had a lovely iPhone specific interface to their iGoogle portal. I started using it as an RSS reader (something it did very well). Then Google decided they didn't want to provide it anymore. I didn't have the choice to keep using it as an old unsupported version; it was gone. Of course, I have the choice not to use iGoogle, but then I have to invest time to get used to netvibes, say.

The problem with the cloud is that while it gives you what you want, everything is rosy; but you have no control over your environment any more. In a away, free-to-the-user services are worse; when Netflix withdrew its multiple queue support and its paying customers protested, it brought them back. As a commercial service they felt they had to pay attention to their paying customers. When Google takes something away, or fails to improve a service because they are off on their next shiny-but-soon-to-languish beta, the user has no leverage at all.

I still like the Cloud; but I am nowhere as gung-ho about moving everything to it as I once was.
I went and played with the feature and I have to say that it is fairly well implemented. Kudos to Google.
Ah Shanghai, the only city i know of that has an elevated high way with roundabouts (check the lower left edge of the map).

That and the spiral onramp to the high tension bridge over the river.
"What's Popular?" Google Gadget
What if that woman happend to be a member of an ultrareligious sect and has no humor whatsoever. What if other women don't mind at all? Don't know what incident happened (was there an incident?), but is it not yet another cliche that women in general have to be offended by certain pictures? What about the women IN the pictures, would they be offended?

I don't want to recommend to use offensive pictures in presentations (some men might be offended, too), but I am pretty sure that such things are NOT the reason for "underrepresentedness" of women.
Early may sounds good for me. And definitely at a bar if possible.
Vote up if you're part of the silent majority that is not interested in this discussion.
JSConf 2009: the best conference you couldn’t attend
>> "I would argue that Hacker News is at least as notable as Digg or Reddit."

Notable to us, sure. But notable to the world? I'm not sure.
You're basically suggesting that high school is to easy. I felt like hs was to easy too at the time. looking back I could've taken more AP's, but honestly, why would I have spent more time learning about things less useful to me when I had the option of learning about more useful things.

What I did was I just started bringing textbooks from any subject I was interested to all my classes and read them. If you are getting good grades no one will care. But really, unless your teacher is really awful they won't care anyway, because there are so many kids who do need help that they should be focusing on. Who gives a shit about the kid who probably could've passed the exam without taking the class when so many kids don't understand basic algebra, especially with no child left behind.

hs sucks, try to learn social skills by observing others and practice thinking about being in other peoples shoes to learn better empathy. Try to learn useful things like econ 101, programming, business stuff, math, etc.

Adolescence really just eats balls and there isn't much you can do about it.
So are there even less women in Rails than in other IT sectors? Or is it all just speculation? I could imagine applauding someone taking a stand against political correctness in certain circumstances.
Wolfram Alpha Harvard-Sneak-Peak Video
No, its not really the same thing. Because there is a very obvious reason that people are upset by that word. My point is merely that you need to explain your reasons, not merely point out your skin color or gender, as if that itself were a reason. Your Jewish friend, for example, has given a very good reason for why jokes about Jews by non-Jews are generally offensive.

In fact, there are cases where using that word in a presentation would be perfectly legitimate, i.e. in a presentation about racist epithets. If someone objected to that, I would bicker with them, regardless of their skin color.
Thoughts on Federally funded science
Google crashes Wolfram Alpha debut
They did a great job with what they've put together so far (and if I would've had reasonable expectations, I'd be happy) but I felt he hasn't addressed some of the toughest problems yet:

handling proprietary data

what if scenarios

training (ie new scientific discoveries require manual intervention)
EC2 isn't really like that. Truth be told, one of the few problems I have with EC2 is the fact that I can't get it upgraded to the newest thing (at least in Windows)

But other than that I agree. I think I've been pretty consistent in saying I don't consider services like Google App Engine or Microsoft's Azure usable unless there's some way to take your program off their servers without rewriting it.

But again, with EC2 it's just a matter of loading the OS on an actual web server and copying your app to that.
P.S. -- my god:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/index.php

Math club heaven. If only the Web had existed when I was a teenager.
Remember infamous Danish cartoons? Do you think cartoonist had to apologize? I never saw those cartoons, so I won't comment. But I will compare this presentation to some of George Carlin's comedy, which I have heard over and over and over again.

Quite a bit of it is offensive, and the offense was the point of his art, he was trying to make us take a hard look at ourselves.

The difference between "art" that is intended to make us uncomfortable and this presentation is that this presentation is not making some of us uncomfortable about our sexuality as a means of giving us insight into technology. It's simply making some of us uncomfortable.

If you care to show me a technology presentation that makes us uncomfortable but does so for the express purpose of provoking us to look at ourselves, I would be delighted to discuss whether it is or is not appropriate to deliver at a conference and whether apologising would or would not be in order.

Until then, I do not accept the parallel.
Is this the first swipe at Wolfram Alpha?
The best ergonomic keyboards on the market.
What if one of the women in the audience was your mom? What if one of the women in the presentation is your mom? What if you're the conductor of a train and you're approaching a fork in the track: If you steer one way, you'll run over five porn stars. If you steer the other way, you'll run into a presenter at RailsConf. What if this conversation never ends? What if we're all just living inside of a computer simulation? Woah.
Quit Smoking Hypnosis
The quit smoking hypnosis CD has been specifically designed to use the best hypnosis techniques along with the best visualization exercises to ensure you the best results as you quit smoking for good.
Techcrunch blogspam. Direct link:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/adding-search-power-t...
You knew I'd say something (Part II)
Looks like SimCity.

I think the look adds something to the map. It's a bit easier to parse and understand than satellite images and adds more information than a standard overhead map.

For those of us who don't read Chinese - what's the story behind this map?
[EDIT: Wording]
To trot out a well worn cliche, the only intuitive interface is the nipple. I have recently been sat in front of a Mac; I do not find it particularly intuitive, and had to ask for hints as much if not more than I would in front of a Windows box (I am primarily a Linux user today, though I have used many OSes in the past - VMS anybody?).

What Apple have is a consistent interface. This is the real point here, that if each OS has a consistent interface between native applications, then a cross-platform application will be at a disadvantage because by definition it will be inconsistent with most platforms. This is true to some extent.

But these days the real competitor to a native app is not a cross-platform app - it's the cloud. It would be interesting to see some data as to whether people prefer an inconsistent cloud app (say, gmail) to a native consistent app (say their native mailer). Absent any data, I am not sure what can be learned here.
Fascinating. I have never seen such dense development before. It looks beautiful and perfect, of course, until you start to jam everyone into it. :)
Stop acting like a sissy and market your company
I hope the roundabout has better lanes then that one does!
Apple Design Awards deadline May 4th
My fault I only read the presentation and from all the couchDB logos I mistakenly assumed it was done by a couchDB developer.
I don't necessarily think Why Nerds are Unpopular is correct in general. Many of Graham's essays are convincing but ultimately specious. However one thing Graham does very well is to pick a thesis and then support it rigorously through a series of straight-to-the-point examples and cogent reasoning. In the end he may be wrong due to omission or bad axioms, but the argument is always convincing at a superficial level.

Your thesis is probably just as defensible as Graham's, but the way you supported it was scattershot and just plain unconvincing to anyone who's been out of high school a few years. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been written or even that the style is bad (it was quite readable), just that the argument could be better made if you cut it down by half and built up the thesis with more solid (or solid-sounding) claims.
if this page is still broken, paste this into the url bar:

javascript: document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML+"<style>pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }</style>";
Plane crash! Fire! Riot! Tornado! Earthquake! Flood!
That's pretty hillarious. But still I think it is useful when you offend a person to try to understand why. If there's something to it, then you apologize, and learn a lesson. But if you apologize wihtout learning anything, your apology is an empty one. Meanwhile, if they're just being hyper-sensitive for no good reason, I am quite happy to pop their bubble.
Needs a map on the front page.
if this page is still broken, paste this into the url bar:

javascript: document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML+"<style>pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }</style>";

(Sorry, double comment, I think I messed something up while messing with this. Also, it kills most of the current style. Anyone have a better variant? Might be good to have as a bookmarklet.)
You are. Just you, tho.
GPL's cloudy future
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGPL
The Wikipedia page has nice stats too ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_H1N1_influenza_outbreak
Displaying flag count for posts might help.
Oprah already bored with Twitter
I don't know about you all, but I am looking forward to JSConf 2010. I can't wait for those crazy organizers to put out the videos!
Spending per GDP is the best actual metric I can come up with for visualizing the "size" or "power" of government in society. There's no 1:1 relationship with regulation, but the two are surely correlated.

In Rand's writing, government spending is equally detrimental to society - but you are correct that spending itself was not in question.
You may want to look into whether your state has a Dual Enrollment program. Many states, such as Michigan, allow students to complete their coursework at a University or community college of their choice while enrolled in a high school so long as the curriculum meets certain guidelines.

I got bored of high school my Junior year, and I spent my senior year at a community college. It wasn't that I disliked high school, I just sick of putting up with the other kids.

The upside of dual enrollment is that the state pays for the credits, which ends up drastically reducing the cost of your college degree.
I dunno... I have a hard time believing that charging actual money for pictures of flowers and puppies is really the game-changing business plan Facebook has been looking for. If they can find some 'virtual goods' that have value beyond 'aww, that's cute,' my opinion might change. Any ideas?
Ok, so it isn't particularly new advice.
Since it's US-specific data, perhaps Google only made this available for US search queries.
Can you remove the <pre> tag on your post, it's breaking the entire page.

It's not a <pre> tag, it's an automatic format that HN applies to indented text. That's why indenting is not the preferred way to show quoted text. I use quotation marks to show text quoted from a submitted article, and the HN convention of an asterisk immediately before and after a block of text quoted from the parent comment (as above, here) to show text quoted from a comment.
It's not worth it to get into a pissfest. I don't care enough. One comment:

If you don't like being generic, then why the hell were you nothing but a bag of gross generalizations in your stupid little essay?

It's not an essay. It's a blog post. I write fast and I write long and I publish everything that I write because I adhere to the belief that perhaps something I write will help somebody with something. I treat my blog like a blog. It's not a professional platform. The stuff I do in my life I keep entirely separate from all the things I write. If I ever got to the point where my sole source of fame was a web site with my name on it, I'd consider myself to have done a piss-poor job with my life. Same if the only thing I had going for my name was an ill-conceived rant clustered around by people who prefer rage to straight thinking.

As it is, I've gotten responses from people to this that've thanked me for writing it. That means that for 20 minutes' work it was time well-spent. My frustration doesn't come from disagreement. It comes from the fact that my post, which is about as good as 20 minutes' worth of quick typing can get you, got put on Hacker News, which is a place where intelligent people discuss meaningful things, when this is a piece that deals in overgeneralities.

When I wrote this piece, my thought wasn't "How can I capture the high school experience?" It was "What is it about this type of programmer that really annoys me?" I hit on my conclusion, which I still stand by, and wrote all the thoughts I've got on the subject matter, typed it quickly, and put it online. I thought it would get a handful of responses. Nothing big, because it's not big or at all important. I wrote two or three things yesterday that I think are better than this particular piece.

But you just ignored the post I just made to focus on my original post, which I've already apologized for. It's obvious that of the two people I said you might be, you're the latter. You're ranting at a mindset that I don't actually have just so that you can be Fucking Awesome Zed now that your blog's been toned down. If you really want to get pissed off at me for things I don't believe, you have every right. But I'm through with this. I expected better from you.
Ask HN: releasing iphone / facebook apps as individual -- any problems?
Hi!

Since I haven't formed my LLC yet; I'm considering releasing iPhone apps as an individual. For those who have released iPhone / Facebook apps as an individual -- have you run into any problems?

Thanks!
Things You Didn't Know About Antimatter
Actually, I would consider the meaning of all the sentences to be the same. The implications are all different, but that's really not surprising or profound in itself. I mean, you could also say that sentence 10 different times referring to 10 different "she's," but that's not at all surprising, is it?