skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've probably heard it, but there was a joke floating around before the last election: the secretary of defense goes to see the President and says Sir, there's been an unfortunate terrorist attack in South America. 5 Brazilian soldiers died. The President thinks about it and says, That's a real tragedy. And, ah...how many is a brazillion, again?
I don't think the truth does appeal to everyone. If it did, then most people would view a mix of media from different viewpoints.

But that just isn't what people do. Most liberals read the NYT and NPR while conservatives watch Fox and listen to Rush. I think most people just want their viewpoints confirmed.
My own code...

(Not because it's perfect and beautiful, but just because I wrote it and understand it.)
21 States See Unemployment Fall in April
I think this is quite in line with the idea actually.
Here's another great explanation of Unicode from PyCon '08:
http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/

It is really helpful in understanding Unicode handling in Python pre 3.0.
The art of computer programming.

Not because it's direct computer code, but because when I'm reading it past code i've written starts swirling in my head.
Sort of one of those "ahhh fantastic" moments.
A librarian is close and I love them and use them a lot. It still takes time for me to read the books and comb through that info to find what is relevant to the particular question.
I've worked on a lot of no-budget movies (no-budget in Hollywood terms is anything under $100k). I have dont feature films that cost as little as $30k. The trick of making a short cheap movie is to know what you're doing well enough to shoot the whole thing in a short period, like 1-2 weeks.

The $70/45 pound is bullshit. Even if you don't pay people (you can get away with this because everyone wants to be in movies), the rule is that you at least feed them and pay for their transport costs (bus tickets or gasoline). Unless you are exceptionally good at scheduling, you'll have them there for a full day which means feeding them twice.

I guarantee this thing cost at least $10,000 in food and expenses. What it probably means is the filmmaker spent $70 and scrounged up the rest from his parents and friends' parents. Even if you do home cooking, feeding and stumping up bus fares for an average of 20 people a day ain't cheap. I hate these kind of stories because when you're trying to raise money for a low-budget movie people say 'well X was made for $150', while many of your suppliers (particularly suppliers of locations, which you can't afford to build) hear 'movie' and think you're going to drop thousands per day.
I think journalists should be treated like most other professions and have certificications and standards that must be maintained. I'm sick of turning on Fox News (or CNN, for that matter) and watching their anchors spew out factually inaccurate commentary that gets passed off as "news". I think that if journalists make false statements then they should get "disbarred" or lose their license to practice journalism.
Very few people will get this reference, but when I had access I used to read the genweb3 code. It's like a whodunnit because there are no comments. :)
Reductio ad Povertium.
Usually I find API documentation more inspiring than actual code. It's higher-bandwidth. That said:

- Some bits of On Lisp

- Haskell's SYB and Parsec libraries

- MINIX (2; have yet to play with 3)
I don’t think that’s true. To give an example of what I mean look at Fox News. FN maintained their support for George W. Bush throughout his Presidency. But most Conservatives started to turn during the last half of his fourth quarter. That wouldn’t happen if people weren’t looking for the truth beyond their bias.

As a matter of fact, if you got the Fox News viewership together I think you’d find most would say they seek out FN because they feel the regular media is biased and want to hear the other side of things (they might subconciously be seeking out like minded news but at least their concious mind is looking for unbiased news). The fact that they need to seek out another biased source to get information indicates to me that they’re seeking truth and just can’t find it.
Funny seeing this, because I was at my local Borders earlier and decided to give that Beautiful Code book a shot. I've seen it on the shelf for quite a while, but those books don't tend to turn my crank, so to speak, so I had never before really considered it.

I only read the first and the third essay, but I must say, wow!

The third essay, for instance, takes a simple 12 line implementation of quicksort in C (which is already quite beautiful), and through a series of well explained transformations, arrives at a four line proof (as in, it's C code that is equivalent to the recurrence relation, and eventually the summation, we all solved in our CS classes) of the average case complexity (~1.4nlgn comparisons) of the quicksort he started with.

That is what I would consider "nightstand" code, or at least a nightstand essay about code. It was actually entertaining, to the point that you don't realize you are solving a recurrence relation in C form until the end, when the parallel becomes obvious.

I only had a chance to skim the other topics, but I'm actually considering buying it, because it really was a blast to read.
It's not journalism I'm trying to save, but rather the journalists. I suppose in any industry, the cream of the crop will always have jobs. I was trying to think of a way to help journalists continue doing what they love: writing, researching, finding truth... while aligning that desire with something of value to the world.

I think the value of traditional journalism is declining. What we traditionally label journalism is actually just entertainment these days. Their goal is lots of eyeballs, not truth or any of that.

But there are people who do need truth or answers and would be willing to pay someone to help them find it. I saw a "Market Research" category at elance, that might be the ticket...
First I figure out how to do what I need to do, then I translate that into the constructs of the language, then I try it and it doesn’t work, and then I debug or figure it out :-).

It's a wonderful thing to have a language that matches how you think, an extension of your mind analogous to how physical tools can be an extension of your body, with a heft, weight and balance that causes them to leap to hand, and guide you at times.

But my particular tasks at the moment involve so much more work at the drawing board (the figuring stage) that having better tools doesn't actually help me - much as I would love them to.

It's very true that the tools you need depend on your personal way of thinking, the task, the stage of the task, and how many times you've done it.
The business school isn't too shabby either
http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=7870

:)
I will be the first to admit that this has been an unnecessary verbal body-slam on my part and I do owe the poster an apology, but:

> The guy expressed an opinion...

In technical circles even opinions have to be defensible. You can't just accept "X sucks and Y rocks" as an opinion and let it pass. The whole place will become abuzz with irrational thought, and overrun with "we are all right" group-think liberal-arts type BS.
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IMHO, the way to "save journalism", for journalists to make money, is for journalists to actually do good, unique, and valuable. (Yup, all three. If they can't do all three, then the last two.) You know, the stuff that chin-tuggers always talk about but rarely do.

I recommend www.buzzmachine.com for discussion on this topic.

BTW - Journalism isn't suffering from a shortage of ideas. It's suffering from a shortage of folks willing to actually do. (Part of the problem is that many of the powers that be "paid their dues" during a golden age as far as money and power goes.)
Shakespeare. It exists. Seriously. It's as beautiful as Shakespeare, but not very fun, sadly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_langua...
Which brings up an important piece of information that we are missing.

What percentage of AA's bookings come from their website, and what percentages come from travel sites like expedia or from travel agents. I know a large number of AA's customers are business travelers.

If 10% of bookings come from the website and they are able to increase it's effectiveness 50%, that would only result in a 5% increase in sales.
This is pretty serious; if true, they just lost a lot of credibility. A mistake people can understand, lying or intentionally misleading people is burning bridges you can't easily get back... I gave the benefit of the doubt, if it turns out this is what they did i'm deleting my account...
The UNIX v6 kernel (Lions book). Every page brims with the excellent, hard tradeoffs required to shoehorn what we'd recognize as a modern system onto a 128K 16-bit machine.
you wouldn't understand it, and it's not a personal problem of mine: just consider my behavior in this discussion a throw-back to a long-dead form of communication from when programmers where held accountable to their words :-)

I should have been nice, we're all equally-right in some way. hugs.
Yeah, I am a former linux laptop user who switched Mac a while back.

Kudos to those 8 kids with "other" OS.
Google Docs integrator app with MS Office, works a treat
Appreciated. BTW I thought that was the only part of your post that was putting down another language. But it didn't seem deliberate, just a casual and unconscious going-with-the-flow put-down of java. As axon said, many people do it. I was struck by your preface + the following statement:

My statements that I prefer Arc for the kind of programming I do was not intended to be a put-down of other languages.

If you should be so unfortunate to be stuck trying to write good code in Java, ...

One solution is to remove the connotations, eg:

If you are writing code in Java, ...

Note: this version is more concise :-)

But please keep the factual points, such that Java's verbosity can mean that removing duplication doesn't make it shorter. I thought that was an insightful and pithy expression of the idea. But I also note that that's not the only benefit of removing duplication.
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pseudocode all throughout cormen... I appreciate industrial code the same way I appreciate a ferrari - without looking at the engine
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"It surprises me that they are so successful, despite their draconian rules, fanboism thrives."

They are the Disney of computing.

Many people like that soup-to-nuts 'We control the experience' experience.
I'm just imagining an anti-English troll, extolling the virtues of Japanese. Actually, Outliers makes the point that Korean has logical words for numbers, which makes maths a bit more accessible. I have to agree, I mean "eleven, twelve". I was irritated with the nonsensical naming of numbers as a child, especially when people said that mathematics was logical.
I'm pretty terrible at working with my hands in the manner described, but this was one of the most enjoyable, well-written and rhetorically adroit articles I have ever seen linked on HN.
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> You can't just accept "X sucks and Y rocks" as an opinion and let it pass.

Why not? The only reason that 'the whole place will become abuzz with irrational thought, and overrun with "we are all right" group-think liberal-arts type BS' is because people can't just accept things like this as somebody's opinion... they have to create a language war out of simple blog post about liking something.

(To everyone else, I'll quit now I promise, obviously I'm not helping the matter!)
Surely you could structure it in a way to avoid this, if the third party picking up the tab wanted to. A contract for reimbursal, so the ex employee pays the lawyer and gets money back from TC? There would be no implicit or explicit relationship between TC and the lawyer, just two two-way relationships.
Assuming they don't have heart issues, get em to try someone else's ritalin/adderall once? If it has an overwhelmingly positive effect, they might seek treatment. If not, it only lasts a few hours.
I am kind of ashamed that the company I work at is part of CBS Interactive. I like the people that I work with. At least our group is in no way affiliated with what's going on here.
Dang, I never knew that photo was from Mizzou. I grew up 45 minutes from Columbia, MO, and most of my high school class attends there.
I've been using Ritalin, not Adderall. Here's my experience:

I started on Ritalin 15 years ago or so. At first, I found myself oddly calm and rational, even at what struck me as really inappropriate times (such as during an emotional conversation with my wife). Like I became Mr. Spock.

Then I noticed that my personal soundtrack disappeared. There was always music running though my head. Assorted, pop-ish, catchy melodies. And they were gone. Sadness.

I think I stopped taken it then, but shortly later went back on it. The effects were not as striking. (The soundtrack returned, hooray! and has not left again since then.)

Nowadays, I find hard to say how well it works. I more or less take it when I feel like it, and I think it helps, but it seems I've acclimated. (Side note: I'm pretty sure the Ritalin, plus Wellbutrin, were key to my quitting smoking. Take note, all you stimulant-chasing dopamine-deprived chain smokers.)

On the other hand, years ago I felt as though there was a TV in my head and someone was changing the channel every second. That's gotten much better. But on-demand focus, still not so good.

Now I wonder if I should try Adderall. I did a stint with Strattera, but it didn't seem to do much.

Meanwhile, I'm writing possibly commercial apps to help me stay organized, so maybe there's an upside. :)
tl;dr: too drunk to even care; so be it HN, I think I'm almost done here;

feels like a fair mention, so I'll push the point and a-void your convention.
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This is Memorial Day weekend too.
"I don't know, after reading this article, I think maybe I should be seeing a psyciatrist this time, and get a second opinion."

Please, do yourself a favor. Don't suffer. Take drugs.

Been there, glad I did. They're not a cure-all, but they certainly help.

And, yes, under a doctor's supervision. Try to find a doctor who will work with you, and give you the leeway to try different things until you find what's best for you.
As opposed to what? The millionaires in charge of GM that got billions? Sounds like Uncle Sam is just hedging his automotive bet. If I didn't know any better I'd say that (cough) made sense.
> But from the facts that have been released, it looks like he just posted screenshots of his successful "hack" on 4chan,

Are you saying that it didn't matter to him whose account it was? If it did, what definition of "not malicious" are we using?
Solutions in Programming Pearls. Each solution is iteratively improved with the proper reasoning.

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-ACM-Press/dp/02...
Maybe this will work like the world of fashion.

Certain designers come out with really off-the-wall stuff, things everyone says no one will actually wear.

But, after seeing it, people's perceptions about the boundaries of style and taste are altered, such that they end up wearing things that, while perhaps not quite off-the-wall, are still more "out there" than previously, because there are new standards for what's weird.

If people get used to hearing "out there" ideas on copyright, other, less radical, ideas that expand personal use sound more plausible.
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For some reason I thought that photo was from the 2005 Startup School.
Soul of a New Machine.

Made me want to go to school for real, and study EE.

I ended up switching to CS (software == opinionated reality; way more fun!) but that book really inspired me.

Especially the ad for Data General employees, described early in the book: "Have fun and make money."

Seems like the correct priority there.
I've always been puzzled. Is ADD an actual disorder? Or is it the normal state of most humans? I have never been diagnosed with ADD. Nor have I ever thought of trying to get diagnosed. But I identify with your comment. In fact, your work habits actually seem pretty normal. I think a lot of people get most of their work done when they are "in the zone" and then spend the other rest of the time procrastinating and wasting time.
UTF-8 encoding in 6 lines, from ezxml:

if (c < 0x80) *(s++) = c; // US-ASCII subset
else { // multi-byte UTF-8 sequence
for (b = 0, d = c; d; d /= 2) b++; // number of bits in c
b = (b - 2) / 5; // number of bytes in payload
*(s++) = (0xFF << (7 - b)) | (c >> (6 * b)); // head
while (b) *(s++) = 0x80 | ((c >> (6 * --b)) & 0x3F); // payload
}
Reminds me of the business card scene from American Psycho: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoIvd3zzu4Y
Southwest is profitable. (They did some intelligent fuel hedging.)
SABRE is moving away from text-based interface to point and click, to the chagrin of many agents.
I plan to add more languages (including Russian) when all the critical issues are settled.
Agreed, the $70 estimate is very misleading. It doesn't include opportunity cost of capital (time), cost of education, his existing equipment, his friends connections etc. etc.

Also, I'd like to add: his opportunity cost is actually HUGE - 5 years earlier and he was not qualified enough (guessing - tied down with education, learning the ropes etc.), while 5 years later and he's too old to be doing this (pushing 40) and probably tied down with wife and kids.
+1 same here!
Duff's device. It opened up my eyes for the beauty of C and insanity of compilers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffs_device
Literate Programming  Knuth(1984)
there's no guarantee that those conversations are privileged as you have a third party picking up the tab

It depends if the lawyer is representing you or not. If a lawyer isn't representing you but is simply engaging in a friendly conversation, sure, he can probably repeat whatever you tell him; but if he's representing you, privilege applies regardless of who is paying his fees. In other words, if someone else is responsible for paying your lawyer's fees, make sure you ask your lawyer the simple question "are you representing me?"

(There's also another legal principle involved here, which is, roughly speaking, that privilege attaches to the expectation of privilege -- so a reputable lawyer will avoid repeating anything which he thinks you might have expected would be privileged, whether you were legally correct or not.)

And of course, the above is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer, rules vary based on jurisdiction, etc.
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I'm sorry, does anybody at all think Arrington has any credibility left? If he broke the story that the sky is blue I'd be suspicious of it.
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I prefer to think of it the same way as stuff out of the demoscene that goes on about producing an awesome demo in 4k... and then doesn't mention that it requires all sorts of stuff to be separately provided through DirectX or OpenGL.
I was diagnosed very with mild ADD and have had my IQ tested and it's pretty darn high.

I went to the doctor and asked for Ritalin once during college and I found that I used it just like caffeine -- I'd be extra focused for a while on getting things done and then I'd realize I was staying awake way later than I planned. But I'd be tired the next day, and so the Ritalin seemed like it was more of a stimulant than a treatment, with one pill equal to about 10 shots of espresso.

I never refilled the Ritalin prescription -- it was no fun being medicated and staying up late and then being tired the next day. I noticed that I was far better at doing mundane tasks that required focus, but FAR less curious and less prone to switching tasks if I was bored.

Notably, I read tons of linux man files at the time and learned how to use a lot of command line utilities that I'd never had the patience to learn before.

But I'd also find that I'd read articles that were actually quite boring and upon finishing them I'd regret wasting the time.

There are a lot of occupations where my Ritalinized state would be an advantage. But one thing I love about my current approach to life is that I am able to leverage my own strengths. Sometimes being a bit scattered is a huge benefit. I also get the "hyper focus" common to people with ADD and there are days when 4 hour chunks go by as if they were 10 minutes and I realize I've accomplished incredible feats of productivity (and yet I remain energized).

Once in a while (maybe once every 2 weeks) I have a very scattered day. I have come to appreciate those days as good opportunities to restore balance. I use them to do extra exercise, eat extra healthy food, pick up the guitar, take an afternoon nap, etc. They are my brain's way of telling me that it wants a change of scenery.

I also find that regular, vigorous exercise and a bit of caffeine in the morning is far more effective than Ritalin was at giving me the ability to avoid being too scattered.

The best insight (which I actually learned from a comment here on HN last year) is that when I do find myself procrastinating it's my brain's way of telling me that I'm not happy with some decision I've made -- maybe an approach to some code, etc. So I use it as a cue to revisit what I've done and most of the time sure enough there is something lurking that was bugging me, and once I address it my productivity is back to normal.

Bottom line: I view mild ADD as a huge asset. I am extremely productive and while I have not yet managed to achieve my desired level of financial success I think I have plenty of ability to get done what I want to get done and tremendously enjoy the creative process and focused work involved.
Doesn't this story run about once every 18 months?
Great tool. I heart it.

Will be nice to see more languages thrown into the mix. Sometimes you want to get out of english to explore more options. Will definitely use it more.
Ode to Git
Think it's just coincidence. Fridays/weekends tend to have less breaking news so we have more time to do more involved posts.
"It may well be that you haven't run into the LIKE + indexes issue or didn't notice it because the table didn't have a lot of data in it."

I dunno, the backups (pgdump -> bzip), last time I looked at one, were over 6GB, so I'd say there's some data in there. I've just never seen Unicode-related issues.

"By the way, do you realise that Django's ORM does not support optimistic locking in a transactionally safe way?"

It doesn't really expose locking, period; consult the many threads on the dev list to find out why.