skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Motorola Q Verizon-Available with additional features
Today’s users are looking for mobility to give them the best combination of style, voice, messaging and entertainment and the Motorola Q delivers. The world’s thinnest QWERTY, the Motorola Q changes the playing field for mobile devices by delivering a superior uncompromising mobile experience in one amazing ultra-thin package.
[note: off topic but it's still somewhat relevant to this crowd as it's an example of how not to implement print view]

That's a rather annoying "print view." http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-...

You gotta go through the article and click on all the "Read more…" links to get the full text before printing and it still has the "Resources" links (as if I can click on them after I've printed out the article, which I'm presumably going to do if I'm looking at the article in print mode).

I expect more from the newspaper that gives such nifty charts, various APIs, etc.
Ask HN: Constant List predicate in python?
Here's something I had to write in a hurry yesterday, and I haven't had time to spend to find the "right" technique. So I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the hackers around here.

Write a routine that returns True iff all the elements of the input list are equal.

Here's a non-pythonic routine:

def is_constant(l):
for i in range(1,len(l)):
if l[0]!=l[i]:
return False
return True

That's a simple, early-terminating imperative loop. Here's a slower and not necessarily clearer version:

def is_constant(l):
return min(l)==max(l)

Personally, the fact that the code is short really appeals to me, but some people would find it unclear in how (and why!) it works.

Here's an even less clear version:

def is_constant(l):
return len(l)*[True]==[ l[0]==a for a in l ]

I'd specifically like to know the answer to this question: Suppose you have to maintain a piece of code that performs this function. What would your ideal code be to find?

Extra marks available for code that deals cleanly with corner cases: empty lists, tuples and generators.
Ask HN: Critique this idea
(first up your welcome to share or create this idea if you really want to :))

Anyway, I had this idea when talking about a scheme to "reward" people for contributions to an FOSS project. Actually paying people is a bit against the grain (and most FOSS has no financial backing anyway) but it seemed like a good suggestion to have a method to personally reward someone in a serious way.
This was also prompted somewhat by a recent link to http://fairsoftware, who's model I quite like :)

So here's the idea. A combination of Twollars and Fairsoftware (and a bit of Tipjoy in there too).

You register your project and get X "shares". As people contribute to the project they can be awarded some of the shares (perhaps there could be SCM integration to give bit-y rewards to lines commited, or perhaps there could be a crowd sourced vote system to decide how much a contribution is "worth" plus, ofc, the ability just to gift shares as and when). These shares have NO money worth - until someone donates to the project.

At which point the owner can set aside a percentage (perhaps that he/she can limit to a certain total amount) for running costs (servers etc.). The rest gets spread out amongst the "share holders".

Instead of actually payiong out the money each holder can select a charity (from a list, or eventually maybe their own) to donate their share too. Their user page shows off how much they have "raised" for the charity.

The contributors get a meaningful reward for their work
The FOSS project gets linked to charity work (always good for the image :))
The donators know their money went to worthwhile places (whilst still showing appreciation to the project)
The project owner still gets running costs

Thoughts? Is this just an over complicated idea or does it have merit? Are there any FOSS contributors, donators or "owners" out there who might have interest in such a setup?

Go!
May I ask for the specifics of your course/field? I wanted to apply for EPSRC funding for a Masters/PhD at Warwick complexity complex but have been somewhat sidetracked by other opportunities. Would like to hear more about other peoples experience down similar roads so I can keep the idea on the back burner and sort out my long term plans.
It reminded me of animated movies where the 3D-scenes are drawn all by hand.
Tech Know - The power and the dorky
Fun game, but it needs a couple things before it is playable.

- Most important is some form of "Maximize" button that puts the game window into full-screen, or at least full-window mode. The game window as it stands is a tiny fraction of my screen, way too small to see what's going on. At the least, I'd expect that somebody has written a GreaseMonkey script by now to set the width of your Flash embed to 100%, but really this is something you should build in yourself.

- For a game that revolves around rapidly clicking things as they come onto the edge of the screen, surrounding said screen with clickable banner ads that open in the same window is just disaster waiting to happen. (that's what ended my playtesting session)

Oh, and one playtesting note: I made it to the end of the tutorial without realizing that I was supposed to have killed that "practice satellite" way back at the beginning. I flew around aimlessly for a while, and was pretty close to simply closing the tab instead of flying all the way back to the start to see if I'd missed anything.
The danger of "language" in programming
Are you UK or US based? There are lots of UK grants I know of to help with manufacturing etc. - the US I know nothing about :)

Anyway as I see it you have 3 options:

1. Attempt to license the design to a current commercial company in the field (assuming there are some). Make sure you protect your design (this again varies depending on country) and then ask for a pitch meeting. It might take some effort to get their attention.

2. Find a small manufacturing company that can refine your design and churn out a small regular supply - then start to sell it to the customers direct. Give it a few months (however long really) THEN try ot license the design to a big company

3. Go the whole hog. Get a bank loan or find a business partner with cash. Sort the manufacturing out and sell everything yourself.

I personally would try #3 but #2 would probably show the most reward inside a year.

I've also made some assumptions about your product and it's field...... :) so I hope it's useful.
Founded in March 2007, Hulu is co-owned by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Providence Equity Partners.

That's from Hulu's media info page. I think it boils down to: the networks trust themselves with their content. They aren't going to trust an outside company founded by people who made their name of pirated content (the Joost founders are the Kazaa people). Frankly, why give someone else the profits when you can create your own content distribution system? Hulu gives them both the control and the revenues.

Note: I'm not making a moral judgement on pirated content, merely explaining a possible thought process of the networks.
A good reading for anyone who feels bad about being a programmer.
or no job with debt or no job without debt.
Not Everyone Can Be On The Board
Sounds complicated (transaction costs!) and people don't donate much to open source projects in any case.

I'll add: how to fund open source projects is a Difficult Problem. A while ago, there was a great mailing list called FSB (free software business), with a lot of illustrious folks. They never really came to any definite conclusions other than "it's difficult".
1. Get latest OpenSolaris.
2. Install latest SunStudio
3. download latest source of Python (3.1) and Ruby (1.9.1).
4. Try to build them with CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc" CFLAGS="-m64"
5. See the results. Run make test for ruby.
The Hacker Ethic - Harming Developers?
Very flexible. Once you learn what the sytnax means the implementation of blocks and iterators is one of the best parts of the language.

3.upto(6){ |x| puts x }

I don't think the uniqueness of a language is any reason not to learn it. To be honest that sounds lazy.

PS I'm not a Ruby zealot, and Python is a great language
I was thinking about that.

Transaction costs (I assume you mean payout to the charity) weould be easy because you just store up the charity donations from everywhere till it reaches a reasonable value ($15 perhaps, or more) then payout costs are minimised.

As to donations - I had a big discussion about that last night. In the end we figured 3 things. Firstly collecting donations is a pain to handle so a lot of people dont bother (especially as there is little worth to them). Secondly there is no culture to donate even though many people probably would if it was easy and they could do it super cheap: a known central service to handle donations wold be recognisable and trusted. Thirdly as a portion of the beneficiary would go to charities and you could actually see that happening it might encourage more people to donate.

In terms of complexity: I think it just sounds more complex than it is. Really it IS just Twollars with a bit more on top.

Does that seem like a reasonable assessment?
Python's C implementation is so clean..

just try to compile it on OpenSolaris with Sun compiler.

hint: Perl or Ruby were passed 100% tests.
Keep one eye on Joost. If Hulu gets too popular they could leave themselves open to accusations of anti-competitive practices and forced licensing of content to other vendors at equivalent rates, at which point Joost will have an advantage as a company that already has the infrastructure.
I don't particularly find unit testing to be effective in programming. While naivety is often a dominating factor, it does not have to be so. First, you should note that you might have a different notion of proper than other people. Second, I don't think you can rank programming inventions. Undoubtly, unit testing is useful. The question one should ask is rather: is it effective? In this question we also lace in the factor of time spent.

Note that the most important programmer commodity is time. Time spent on a unit test means less time to write the program. Now, what ought to tip the scale is that later changes are easier to get right so in the long run, one should win time by writing down unit tests.

But personally, I think that there are other practices which are more effective: Static typing, assertions and automated test harnesses for the whole program. I'll choose to spend my time on these rather than unit testing.
def f(x):
return not x or x == [x[0]] * len(x)
Collection of Best Most Interesting Silverlight Tutorials
As Rod the Mod said a long time ago: He's got a lot more money than sense...
I work on Linux, Mac is a hobby.

It is a bit of a failure to go the virtual way, but I have too little background on (modern) bsd stuff.
How the weather affects businesses
Thanks for the response. I'm in the US, and I've got enough money. The main reward I'm interested in is seeing my work being put to good use and helping people.

If I knew where to go, I could/would just hire someone to start the business and do all the work. Barring that, I may drop it rather than have to deal with the manufacturing contracts, staffing, certification, sales, and support stuff. I'm not even enthused about cold calling random firms and seeing what they have to say about manufacturing stuff, but I would like to see how that works and see if there's a way I could do this sort of work better in the future (failing going back to school for electrical engineering).

As to licensing to an existing firm.. that's a good idea for some projects, but I don't think it'd work with the one I'm closest on right now. They'd have to be awfully progressive, otherwise it'd seem too far from their current business.
It only relies on Obj-C runtime, so it could conceivably run on any system.

Given the name though, I would surmise that is low priority for the developers.
Web Startup Summer Camp for Students & New Entrepreneurs
This is somewhat tangential, but I'm pretty sure that Google re-writes the search code ever few years.
My Dad took thousands of slides of family events through the years, all kodachrome. When the family was contemplating scanning them and putting them on CD or other media for backup, I said that the best archival material was likely to be kodachrome itself.
Er, wrong.

Granted most things people call DSLs frankly are not, an internal DSL is a well known concept and repeatedly implemented in a lot of languages.
If you check the video, you'll find that the problem is cultural. Its a union and management problem.
may be you can use ohloh.net to see individual contributions on a project and derive some calculations based on that. or may be you can even link the "donor concept" into it. ?
The client ran like a dog on my machine, and was some kind of rainbow interface. Bizarre!
Just as a quick note, you can use '{' and '}' instead of 'do' and 'end' if you want. Standard conventions say that one line blocks get {}, and multi-line ones get do-end.
Just my personal story, but perhaps extrapolating from it will help answer your question.

At my job I use Python because, well, at some point before I arrived one of the senior developers went on a jihad against Perl. :-)

I've read stuff about Ruby and while some things about the language intrigue me, it seems that any application you can build with Ruby can also be built with Python. If I'm going to learn another programming language in my Copious Free Time, I want to learn something really different from what I already know, not something that has pretty much the same features with different syntax and libraries. So Python wins by inertia.
Look up "Swedes in richest men list". Some people seem to manage.

I'd even suggest that "geographic constraints" is thinking it wrong, if you re-read Dennis, or look at actual facts. Discarding the formality of money accounts, there were "rich people" in Stalin's USSR and Mao's China. The degree of unpleasantness of the process varies, of course.
"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."

-- Rob Pike circa 1991
bottom line: some degrees pay off more than others.

as recent census data shows, advanced degrees in business or engineering may earn up to 15% more, in contrast to degrees in arts or anthropology which face no substantial increase
Well, I can answer at least a few of those 'WHY?!'s.

Firstly starting with my_string['foo'] = 'bar', this is a syntax that is used a lot in Ruby for anytime that you wish to recover a subset of a collection - you can use it with a Dir object for example to recover a subset of directories/files, or in the case of a hash, to recover the object stored at the key. The thing is that you need to think about it as being a subset operator, rather than an index operator.

The exclamation point at the end of a method name has no syntactic meaning - it is simply a naming convention used by the standard libraries to indicate when the method mutates the object or not. Same same for method names ending with a question mark, it's just a convention to indicate that the response will be a boolean.

As for the whole "5" * 2 vs. 2 * "5", I must admit to not understanding where you're coming from. I don't see how you could expect any other kind of behaviour from an object orientated language. Personally I don't like over-riding arithmetic operators for non-number types, for precisely this reason, but hey, some people like it, so why not?

Integers converting to strings? I think every language has that no? I mean there's always something like:
sprintf(myStringPtr, "%d", myInteger);
or
cout << myInteger;

etc etc

By making this a standard method on all classes (to_s), Ruby makes it really easy to dump a class to a serial format, which is very useful for debugging, as an example.

I get the impression that you simply didn't spend enough time with Ruby to come to understand its idioms, in which case, you're not really in a position to effectively criticise the language...
Best Tips for Every Web Designer, Just Starting Out Should Know
I completely agree. I thought it suspiciously akin to a play against "Sugar CRM", which is a much better name "Hey, did you enter that into Sugar?" If they're playing off a competitor's name, then someone should have coached them about how that practice usually leads to crappy names.

That said, it's open source, and might actually give someone the opportunity to perform an experiment I've been toying around with for years: Basically you release an open source product, fork it immediately and change nothing but the name, and see which version performs the best. Think of it like split-testing, but for the entire product.
Unfortunately, the HTML and CSS that makes EveryBlock so useful is not included in this release.

I'm not sure why the Knight Foundation didn't insist that these components be part of the release, unless the designers were paid out of a separate budget.

I understand that releasing these components would have led to clones of the site, but I think, to a certain extent, that is one of the goals of the project.
Acid3 receptions and misconceptions and do we have a winner?
The Ubuntu team on Mono
I think you'd need to define the value of contributions before you ever begin. Otherwise, time will be spent bickering of the value of work, and not actually doing the work.
Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard
Sure. But noise imposes a fundamental limit on resolution.
"5" * 2 == "55"

You're calling a method on a string, so you got the string doubled. Seems to make sense to me.

Obviously in this case the order of the arguments matter.
Disaster recovery in the trenches
Sinclair: The TV Movie
Free Flash Social Bookmarking Component : Flash Bookmarks
I know plenty of people with no degree who are working - some in quite highly-paid and fulfilling work. They've got there through being in the right place at the right time, internships, voluntary work and being good at what they do.

I also know a number of very talented people who've graduated university with BA and MA degrees this year - most of whom are currently scrambling over one another grasping desperately at what meagre scraps of low-paid part-time work exist in the radio industry at the moment. You can't put it in such simplistic terms. (I went out with a girl who'd been to Oxford a couple of years ago. She was jobless and living in a council flat.)
I was asking how they are doing it from browser. But it appears that we need to install a local client :(
... it only takes a minority to sour the majority.

That's a decision you make for yourself, not an absolute truth.
Isn't it the same with Windows?
Posted here before, but still good.

I wonder if this happens to founders? Surely there are some twentysomethings who saw their balance go from three digits to seven in a day. They probably do not have seven kids or a poverty mindset to be unlearned, but surely some have problems.
Except... if X is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y dollars, but people who do X will earn less than Y dollars, who in their right mind is going to go and do X?

If the effort/reward/value equation doesn't balance, the role will go unfilled until it does.
U.S. immigration rules blamed for tech brain drain
Ask HN: how do I sell git to my colleagues?
I want to start using git at work instead of svn but advocate using it my colleagues merely hum and nod but don't seem convinced enough to make the switch. How can I tip them over the edge?
Management consultants in India
leading approach unique position as the UK's only provider of business aligned property strategy is based on the ability of its staff to combine specialist real estate knowledge with sophisticated management skills.
Hollywood Free Movie Download: Dead Snow [2009] DvDrip
"The solution to the problem is, without a doubt, education," the adviser says. "Change won't happen until grown men start wanting to learn."

That sums it up right there and by "it," I mean "all of it." The problem. The problem with our society. The problem with the educational system. The problem with our national debt. With our dependence on foreign oil.

Why don't people want to learn anymore? I don't understand why it seems so easy, so obvious, that "this" just isn't the way.

Am I the only one frustrated by the continued bad decision making? We sell these poor athletes, and I mean poor in every sense, the illusion of wealth and fame and happiness and then rip the carpet right out from under them. It takes years, decades of dedication to a dream and then they are bankrupt. Not only do they not have the millions they were "promised," but they have no education, no skills applicable outside sports, their bodies are too old to do the only thing they can do.

Why do we keep doing this to people?

It's really sad. It makes me really sad.

What's going to happen? I can't see anything good coming from this. I can't see any good future down this path. It feels so much like the wrong path. I feel like I'm being taken down this bad path against my will. I don't want to go down this path, but it's like I'm stuck in this huge pack of people all stampeding toward a huge cliff and I don't want to run over the cliff. "There's a cliff ahead!!" I yell and no one hears it, they're too busy running, not even knowing where they are going.

What am I supposed to do? What are people who don't want to go off the cliff supposed to do?
No nausea here. I want to see this technique used in real movies... great opportunity to get something that feels new on the screen.
Small, clean, clear. Fails for tuples. One could use:

def f(x): return not x or list(x) == [x[0]] * len(x)

Does have the downside that it constructs a list, which the min==max solution doesn't.

I wonder if there is a single "ideal" solution ...
more sensitive equipment developed in the future would lower the noise floor, to the fundamental limit of resolution.
You need to install BrowserPlus - but that's an in-browser installation (without a restart) and is fairly seamless.

During the beta you also need to download/install a BP plugin. This is only because Yahoo haven't signed the plugin - and will install automatically when they have.
Start a parachute company
People who previously had no problem working on the project without direct compensation will now feel undervalued if they don't get shares, but other people do.
Bitquabit - The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News
Once you put a dollar amount on work you have done, and then hand it over to someone else you run into a can of worms regarding taxes. Uncle Sam will want a share, and will eventually get it.
Is svn working for them? What problems are they having with svn that git would solve for them? If there isn't a compelling reason, you're probably better off sticking with svn. OTOH you could use git personally as a front-end to svn. If your coworkers see an improvement in your development workflow then it might get them to switch. And if I were you, I'd let them know how much easier and faster development is for you on git.
I pity your surprise-birthday-party-less wife.
True. Also, having quantified the value of each contribution might actually create a disincentive for joining the project: that 5-line patch that was going to be my very first contribution is now officially worth nothing, so why submit it? By laying a focus on the top contributors instead of the new/potential ones, this undermines the crucial ability of F/OSS projects to motivate people to _gradually_ extend their involvement.
Tutorials of Best Distinctive and Famous Logos: Photoshop Tutorials
"Why don't people want to learn anymore?"

Most of these athletes never did.

They are the opposite of us. While we were misunderstood for all those years working our butts off in anonymity, they were getting their butts kissed. From the time they were toddlers. All the way through school where they were promoted along whether or not they ever went to class.

When you have nothing left for the ass kissers to kiss, then what are you going to do?
hence the donations model :) the contributor gets no cash-in-hand, so taxes aren't a problem (just our taxes for donating to charities etc.)