skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try getting a moderately complex shell script to run across different platforms. I dare you.

That's a broken premise. Your deployment script doesn't need (and should not) be complex by any metric. Your dependencies are ssh, tar, mv, cp, rsync/git/svn and a very small number of other utilities which are easily tested or wrapped for compatibility.
If you think you need more then you're likely doing it wrong (e.g. trying to reinvent version control and package management at the same time).

and they vary from platform to platform

That's the other broken premise. You don't "build once, run anywhere". You build platform specific modules and only trigger them centrally. Puppet shows the way.

To me it seems like you never actually used shell script for anything serious.

Hm, let me think, I've created and managed a deployment of >20 racks. But yeah, nothing serious.
Quid pro quo?

Perhaps they fancy being partnered with Google?
I haven't tested building on Mono (as noted, I just got TestKernel building), but I believe it should with few problems. I believe the only thing you'll have to do is install nasm (in addition to the normal deps) and change lines 51 and 52 of Renraku.build to:

<exec program="mono" commandline="Obj/Compiler.exe Obj/TestKernel.dll" output="Obj/kernel.asm" />
<exec program="nasm" commandline="-o Obj/kernel.bin Obj/kernel.asm" />

Let me know if you run into any issues.

Edit: Note, you need to have Boo 0.9.0 or better to build the code.
Generally, if you have an idea and are wondering if any patents would interfere with it, you can ask a lawyer (pick one who knows about patents) to conduct a "right to practice" search. They will look through the existing patents to see what might affect your products, and they can also look into whether there is prior art to defeat those patents.

A lawyer should also be able to explain to you that a patent application hasn't been examined by the patent office yet, so its claims (the part you care about) are subject to change as the examiner reviews them. They can usually provide a watching service to you, to monitor the status of the application you're interested in, as it goes through the patent office.
+1 for inline-block
Yes, The shortcuts are painful, countless times I've wished I had more fingers per hand...

But I don't think this will be be any use for anyone who has gotten used to the layout of emacs already... I know I wouldn't. Once those shortcuts are hardwired to your brain, there is no going back. Plus if the shortcut ends up being really too painful, most everyone would just adjust it in their .emacs.

But this is something I will definitely suggest any newcomers to emacs.
I am not a laywer, so this is not legal advice. It's just an informed opinion. The short answer is maybe, but probably not. Applications are not worth much. How far along is the app? You can get some public information. Go to http://www.uspto.gov/ebc/index.html and scroll down to Public PAIR. Enter the application number. Look at the history. If the examiner has had a lot of actions then that's a sign that the claim set is being reduced (maybe). Remember, it does not matter what is discussed in the abstract it's all about the claims. If you can find a way to worm around the claims then you are not infringing. But, remember that if issued the patent holder can sue you and make you defend yourself. Can you afford that? On the other hand, who owns the patent (app)? Can they afford to sue you?

As an alternate option, if you can find some prior art there are several ways to bring that to the examiners attention (for a few thousand dollars in fees) and maybe you can torpedo their application before it's even issued.

What I recommend you do if you are serious is to speak to an attorney. Now that you posted this you might have trouble claiming you never knew about it... and knowingly infringing a patent brings treble damages.

Take care, and good luck.
just launch in UK
I don't know if I completely agree with why the author thinks this is unnecessary. However, I do agree that this would be a bad thing. I think making domain names anything under the sun would make it harder to find things and more confusing overall. I like the defined structure of the specific tld's that exist now and it does feel like a 10k fee for new ones is a money grab.
Just dash off an application and get the $25 in free AWS credit. Spend less than 10 minutes on it and it's a pretty good rate of return.
Are you serious?

I would say if he took Tylenol in his life he would be more likely to get liver damage from that. I can't even find one study showing ANY relationship between liver damage and LSD.
"Google... said users would no longer have to worry about viruses, malware and security updates"

I'm guessing since most applications on Chrome will be web-based, the vendor will worry about them. They will be able to more easily and quickly detect + destroy phishing schemes, viruses etc. Kind of like how Facebook has responded to malicious wall posts.

For me the bigger concern would be the loss of productivity due to downtime of web services, or loss of internet connectivity.
I agree, initially for a different reason to the other commenters here - text doesn't take up that much room.

If you assume that each book is translated in each language then the figure is way short. But it's probably better to interpret it as each book in its original language.

I've read a figure of 7000 languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnologue). A survey discussed here (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1005120803482) suggests up to 175 million books ever published. That's 1.2 trillion uniques.

But if we just worked with the 175 million figure then 50 petabytes would allow 300 megabytes per book. In fact assuming say 3 megabytes (base 2, mibibytes) per book you could fit just under 18 billion books.

My figures are a little off from just using base 2 instead of base 10 but you get the gist of these back of the napkin numbers.
I can see a lot of potential for phishing abuse with this new system. Slight misspellings of longer TLD's especially. I know that ICANN is claiming that they are going to keep a tight hold on this sort of thing but the reality is it is tough to keep on top of.
Yes, this is a bit curious. GFS cells are generally restricted to particular eng groups depending on the need, so I assume this particular GFS cell was fairly restricted, but it's still somewhat worrisome that unrelated, non-production code could lead to an outage of this scale. I expect whoever wrote the offending code is very aware of the repercussions of their work this week :)
A more robust search would be welcome. I live in the desert southwest, so most of those plants wouldn't survive here. I assume someone living in Maine would have similar problems.

It would be nice to be able to search by all the categories you have listed on each plant (growth rate, growing zone, sun preference).

I would also really like the ability to search for sellers nearer to me. If I can get something from in state I'd prefer that than having a plant shipped to me from across the country.
Modern-day Germany has a military:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr

Call it a defense force, or a militia, or whatever you will, it's still the German military.
Sporadic LSD use will never cause chronic, permanent liver damage.
It's good history (the picture of the Symbolics keyboard is worth it all by itself), but very poor analysis, I think. The stuff about the cursor motion keys is just plain wrong. For a keyboard that has ctrl mapped to the left of A (i.e. "swap with caps lock"), C-{F,B,N,P} is much easier to type than moving one's hand off the home row and over to the arrow keys. I honestly don't know what the author was thinking here, and I strongly suspect that he doesn't actually use Emacs for much in practice.

Some of the criticism is valid, like the lack of C-Shift-[a-z] bindings, and the continued use of weird archaic stuff on easy-to-type bindings. Which is fine. Certainly every serious user is going to have their own tastes and preferred bindings {+}. But trying to generalize from a few nits to say that "Emacs Keyboard Shortcuts are Painful" is very much making a mountain out of a molehill.

{+} For myself, I like M-i for overwrite-mode, so I don't have to get to the Insert key, and M-g for goto-line, which is an xemacs binding I got used to years ago).
WoW and the Sims 3 both use OpenGL based rendering engines (actually dual OpenGL and DirectX). They are multi-platform (Blizzard is smart) and run on Mac and PC. Almost all game engines except valve use this approach. This makes porting to PS3, Wii and other OpenGL like toolkits easy. XBOX360 + PC are DirectX based and PC/Mac/Wii/PS3 are OpenGL based. The highest selling games usually target both types.

I was just stating due to the recent consoles there is largely not a reason to get a PC solely for gaming as much as there always was. I personally am a PC gamer but I also develop games and most new stuff is multi-platform.
Looks interesting, but why not make it web app, rather than a Firefox extension?
The local aspect is high on our list. We want to be nationwide, but with results weighted to display stuff from nearby. Plants from a nearby nursery will be better acclimated and have a shorter shipping distance. There are also inter-state live plant shipping laws that can be avoided by shipping from inside the same state.

But yeah, all good feedback. Thanks!
We've already had two stimulus bills...
Perhaps the education can go both ways:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Costa_Rica

So, yep, they've still got a military, it's just also their police force (and national guard), which is pretty smart, in my opinion.
"Funes the Memorious" is allegory
did you get a confirmation?
Or people who would actually take the time to hand-write a letter and mail it to someone.
Wow man, leave this crap on Slashdot where it belongs.

Nearly every statement you've made about Safari has been subjective. You're entitled to that. But there's no reason to lose your lunch when somebody disagrees.

I'll share my own subjectivity that the only thing "worse than shit" right now is your attitude about this.

We're talking about a browser.

And I'll tell you what... FF on Mac is absolutely horrible. I use safari on my mac (at home). When using Windows (at work), I use FF3 and Firebug.

I don't mind going back and forth between them. And I have learned to accept that fonts do look fuzzy in Safari and the dev-tools in FF are sub-optimal.
I have yet to find "normal" people exchanging non-worthless information on Twitter.

As near as I can tell, the situation can be summed up thusly: People that publish or broadcast are rightly smitten with Twitter since it fits well with the model of one-to-many information exchange.

What that results in, however, is an inaccurate representation of the usefulness of it by the media. I get to hear all day from bloggers and broadcasters how miraculous Twitter is (and for them it is), yet every time I attempt to avail myself of it I'm utterly disappointed with the signal to noise ratio.

At best, Twitter is a mechanism for press releases with a 140 character limit. At worst, it's a stuck open valve from which people dribble their mental diarrhea.
There is something about the silver-blue glow of a Mac and it's zippy lines that seems to borrow from the hallucinogenic experience. Certainly, I've never seen while on halluginogens anything as garish, discordant, and downright ugly as the Windows primary-color scheme.

Of course, there's also the experience of seeing the world turned upside down and inside out that, in small doses, is probably good encouragement for creativity.
> According to Web traffic analysts, people type Match.com into Google and then click the top result. Are these people stupid? No, they're smart: It takes a lot of work to remember every company's exact domain name

Yeah, it takes a lot to remember the domain match.com, that's why people go to google and type there match.com

From my experience, people do it because 1) they have no clue about the address bar, or 2) google is their home page and when they open their browser the focus is set automatically on the google's <input> element rather than on the location bar.
Actually, a mini-series of articles. Both useful and inspiring.
The FlexPicker: Industrial Robot Built for Speed - Video
Anything is better than the Lotus Notes "Egyptian Hieroglyphics" password protect. Entering a password iPhone-style has a nice fluidity to it, as each leading character melts into a dot.
You guys are awesome, can't thank you all enough. It looks like I definitely need to talk to a patent attorney (I've already had a preliminary conversation with one but this was prior to learning of the existing application).

My issue is that I am not independently wealthy and so to make this happen (technical design, schematics, sourcing, manufacturing, etc etc) I'm definitely going to need to secure funding. It is my understanding, and this may be way off, that a patent is a requirement of sorts when seeking funding. Of course a licensing agreement would circumvent the need to an extent but as was mentioned by noonespecial, you can never really be fully protected.

Thanks again guys -- invaluable.
Time travel for only $5k
I still can't wrap my head around the idea that the US borrowing money to give consumers can get us out of trouble caused by borrowing too much money in the first place.

It's kind of like giving a skydiver a shovel so that when his 'chute fails he can just dig a hole in the ground so fast that he never has to touch bottom.
but the fact that you can get something sequential out of a dictionary and revert back to tuple assignment is trivial.

I disagree with this assertion. This functionality is not trivial and it wasn't in early Python versions -- certainly not before the introduction of __iter__!

It's existence is testimony to the continuing evolution, and consistency of the Python language. Whether this is a good thing or not I suppose depends on your point of view. I imagine Lispers would see it as a black mark that we had to wait for Guido to implement it. Pythonistas on the other hand probably value the fact that it was well thought out and discussed via a PEP, and is universally implemented. Perhaps both are valid points of view.

Your challenge is interesting because it's so easy to solve in Python that I can't imagine anyone except a Lisp programmer seeing anything in it to object to. In Python it is trivial to replicate the functionality albeit with a different syntax -- and syntax seems to be king for many Lisp fans.

>>> def unpack(d, keys):
... return (d[key] for key in keys)
...
>>> d = { 'key1': 'val1', 'key2': 'val2', 'key3': 'val3' }
>>>
>>> (x,y) = unpack(d, ['key1', 'key3'])
>>> print (x,y)
('val1', 'val3')

I like the Python version because I have to understand only two concepts to work out what's happening: Firstly there's a function call. Secondly the iterable result of the call is unpacked to a tuple.

The merits of the Clojure version I'm not qualified to say, but is it really better in all regards than the Python equivalent? Even clarity, readability, comprehensibility?
I so hope they lower the DX next.
I was with you up to this point, bash is not portable

I have yet to encounter a system where bash wasn't available, so yes I'd say it's quite portable.

You are right, though, it would be more consequental to run with vanilla bourne shell.

and it is a hideous shell.

Well, that's a holy war I'm not so interested in. In my opinion all shells are quite horrible. The idea is to pick the lowest common denominator and bash just happens to be the most popular of the bunch. Your chances of finding a working /bin/bash on any given system are still orders of magnitude higher than finding a working capistrano/fabric along with the corresponding ruby/python toolchain.

But again, I agree that if you're forced to deal with esoteric platforms then your chances of finding a working bourne shell are even higher than that.
UF Pharmacy college requires iPod touch for students
Arguably, the only reason why OSX could be considered the only system that test via virtualization is that Apple makes it illegal to virtualize OSX in the first place.
Given that LSD is such a powerful hallucinogen, the usual amounts ingested don't even show up as far as your liver is concerned.
The RGB thing also drives me completely crazy to the point that I have started muttering obscenities under my breath like a mad man every time I see one.
None whatsoever. I think this myth might originate with the fact that some mushrooms deliver results similar to LSD, but others can be seriously poisonous.
I'm both and neither. I'm pretty sure I'm non-24. Which would be fine if I didn't have to be awake at particular times and have kids to look after.
$10k? Try $185k application fee and then $25k a year. The prices might change but that's the current plan AFAIK.
I'm pretty sure Gates did LSD ..
An infinite loop does not a virus make. With a multithreaded OS an infinite loop is not really a problem. Limiting resources to some defined level is a "solvable" problem.
My very first major mistake in business
Configure and Use Dynamic DNS
They can also do it to avoid phishing scam. Like logging on to credit card company site, I trust google to deliver the right domain for me.
Actually, with unit conversions, the solution is often parenthesis. http://www07.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+attoparsec+%2F+%28m... totally works
I was going to say something similar but this pretty much sums it up. I read the postmortem written by the Sunlight Foundation guys; while they were well-meaning and I don't want to knock their effort, they didn't stand a chance.

Getting Federal work isn't anything like working in the private sector. There's all the paperwork to go through, putting together a proposal and writing all the contracts (which is a huge amount of work and is basically done at-risk), and that's just to avoid getting your proposal thrown out. To actually win, you need connections.

A "good" government contracting officer can basically use the FAR to their agency's benefit, and in effect steer the contract to whomever they want to win. If you're not that person, you're done for. I'm not even implying anything illegal, just that the FAR is so complicated and has so much room for subjective judgment, it's pretty much guaranteed in my experience that contracts will be awarded to whomever the agency feels most comfortable working with.

It is not a system that is kind to outsiders. If you don't have a staff full of proposal writers and lots of experienced people with personal networks to draw on and extensive resumes, your best -- and IMO only -- bet is to cozy up to one of the big players and work as a subcontractor for a while.
Is it too easy to spam Twitter by using hashtags?
In my opinion not really. The whole article boils down to "CTO's should allow corporate developers more time to develop rather than rushing them because rushed programmers produce bad code"

It's not a bad point but to my eyes it's an obvious one.
What programmer hasn't been told to do code right the first time so it's easier to maintain? And since she didn't provide any suggestions on how to get CTO's to do this or how to justify the initial expense to management the whole article comes across as just a rant.
"This is unfortunate, because a more modest man could create a great tool like Alpha but then assume that he didn't know all of the ways that people would use it, and therefore not require interfacing with it through a broken natural language engine. Wolfram, on the other hand (like many bright people) assumes that only he knows the answers and doesn't bother to think that others might be able to do more with the tool than he could ever think of."

I promise I'm not trolling, but that sounds a lot like Steve Jobs.
Some of the suggested bindings make sense to me. I especially like the inverted-T cursor motion keys on I/J/K/L. And as much as I might hate to admit it, the CUA-like cut/copy/paste bindings probably make more sense than the default for anyone but a hardened emacs veteran.

Other stuff seems borderline insane. Like this design principle:

cursor moving commands are placed all for the right hand, while text changing commands are all placed for the left hand. (similar to Dvorak having all vowels in one side)

Dvorak does that because vowels are usually typed alone in a word, so the natural typing pattern is an alternation between hands, minimizing the chance that a single finger might have to type two keys in succession, or a hand might be left in a poor position for the new key. That's completely wrong for this situation! A motion key is likely to be followed by more motion, while if you're modifying text, you're likely to continue modifying text.

Or this one:

Alt is considered better than Ctrl. (Alt is a natural thumb curl, Ctrl is stretched pinky.

This might be true on some keyboards. It certainly isn't on typical laptops, where Alt almost never lives in a consistent position across hardware. Relying on keys without fixed positions is just bizarre, and in direct contradiction to "ergonomics" to my mind. What's worse, this completely ignores the pervasive practice among emacs users of mapping Ctrl to CapsLock, a key which is extremely easy to type and in the same location on all keyboards.

On the whole, I just can't see these bindings actually helping me that much, sorry. It's a good try, and I'm sure the author gets good use out of them. But to my fingers, they introduce as many problems as they solve.
I remember being a teenager, and hearing a lot of rumors that made it sounds like some big time engineers were pretty serious LSD advocates.

From what I was hearing, most of the top scientists and engineers in the world had either used LSD, or were still actively using it.

How common is that? Was this all just a bunch of BS? I know there are some really really fantastic coders that hang out here, do any of you guys actively use psychadelic drugs?

As somebody that tries to stay away from any sort of drug (except alcohol. I have a weak spot for beer) as much as possible (including over-the-counter things etc.), has using these things benefited you in any way?

The way that I have heard LSD etc. users describe its affects, it sounds like it would be anything BUT beneficial.
Having names ending in ".com" is great - it says explicitly that the thing is a web address. Just like how the hyphenation of a phone number 123-456-7890 tells you right away that it's a phone number. This is part of why ".com" is more desirable than ".net", ".org", et al. It also shows how blatantly stupid this idea is, since it removes all framing from a web address, making the web harder overall to use.
Is a crypto-fascist like a crypto-zoologist?
My wife told me that some of her coworkers will use their Yahoo homepage to search for Google, and from there they will search for Facebook. She even tried to teach them about the address bar, and they don't care.

I think for many people it doesn't really matter if there is a better way. They find a way to get what they want, and as long as they can remember that, there's no need to think about it anymore.
Planning on spening money a year from now doesn't stimulate anything for quite some time. But it does increase interest rates, at a time when lending is getting killed.

Buffet is a great investor and manager, but you can't map that ability to public policy magically.
I've found I sometimes type domain names into the search box just because my fingers are better trained to use "Ctrl-K" than "Ctrl-L" or "Meta-D". Especially since "Ctrl-K" is pretty cross platform, while shortcuts for the location bar vary by OS and browser.
Sure, but they're talking about average web users
Sometimes it's less difficult. For example, it took me a while to remember that the HN search engine is at searchyc.com. And sometimes it's faster: I can get to my uni's website by googling just keio instead of typing www.keio.ac.jp.
your footer is HUGE