skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have found from my experiences trying to force myself out of my comfort zone, that the experience of being approached and spoken to a stranger is MILDLY disorienting and raises certain alarms.

However... it is not nearly as awkward for the receiver as most people think it will be. It is mostly stressful for the initiator.

The main concern from the receiver's side is, what does this person want from me. The golden phrase for me when someone doesn't open smoothly is,

>>"I just saw you sitting there, and you seemed like a really interesting, stylish person."

Or some other statement of interest. That seems to set their minds at ease, because you've "shown your cards" as it were, and aren't about to spring some sales pitch on them.
I think my delivery here might have been a bit..bad.

I'm not talking about specialists giving abstract data to non-specialists. I'm talking about users that refuse to learn how to use outlook because they can just ask somebody else. This mentality of "I don't want to learn" usually leads to the belief that the person doing it for you is bad at communicating.
"Hate" would be too strong, but I thought it was a stupid article. What Google is releasing seems to be a Linux kernel with a new window manager running Chrome. I don't think that's nearly as difficult as he makes out.

He's right that the netbook market is tiny, but it's also poorly served by existing operating systems, so it might be a reasonable place to start. And it certainly makes sense for Google to make using webapps easier, because their core business is based on all that traffic.

Anyhow, the article felt to me like it was trying too hard -- lots of hyperbole but few ideas.
for the sake of language geekdom, it would be done in J something like this:

- +/ p * ^. p

where p is the array. you can even remove the duplication of the array with a so-called hook:

- +/ (* ^.) p
Not sure why you are using lambda syntax instead of defining a method shrug, but anyway I don't think the type inference shortcoming is inherent to static typing.

See this similar post regarding type inference on fields: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/26/why-no-...

I'm sure there is an equally reasonable explanation of costs and implications for your example. Eric Lippert would probably be happy to share it with you, why not ask him? :-)
Interesting that Mozilla spent years to make nice add-ons support, so Chrome will be there only after ~2 years of work, but Mozilla will be far ahead in that time.
It appeals to our experience with everyday things. We have a mental model for how much information is on a piece of paper, in a book, or in a second of video.
Yes - to the extent that fabric is just a framework for building shell deployment commands and could run the shell command.

I think there's a lot of (forgive me) synergy from pairing pip, virtualenv and fabric together though: pip can easily install a project into a virtualenv by checking it out of a source code repository (currently git, bzr, svn, hg I believe). Rebuilding the environment then is just a matter of "freezing" the current virtualenv, transferring the list to the host and building an env with the appropriate packages (down to revision #) that's a "put" and a "run" - two lines in a fabfile.

The article links to one of my blogs which links to the slides from talks I did on pip, virtualenv, and fabric for Baypiggies a few months ago: http://simeonfranklin.com/blog/2009/mar/28/baypiggies-presen... if you're interested...
Assuming I never had downtime, I could make that much consulting from the comfort of my own home at my usual hourly rate.
I like what the wii and the android browser do, they show the last inputted character for a second or so
I haven't seen a followup post, but I hope so too... I'm planning on going but I'm not sure how I'd recognize anyone.
"Unit tests measure the quality of material used to build the application. Functional tests measure the strength of the application structure. The overall quality of the application is dependent on both."

I understand what the author is getting at with the bridge analogy, but I think it's best to avoid analogies, especially in contentious arguments. Otherwise, we'll end up in a battle of dueling analogies about bridges and code - with each analogy containing the key assumption that either validates or refutes the argument.

I'm not glad that there's "negativity about unit testing" either, but I am glad that some people are starting to subject the 99% unit test coverage goal to a cost/benefit analysis - and, yes, concluding at times that it isn't worth it.
How about having to select the (masked) text, to take it a step further?
Not to mention that doing so is most likely a violation of their TOS...
You're right, statically typed languages can use type inferencing; both Haskell and Ocaml do.
Warren Sturgis McCulloch television interview
How to Set Your Ad Prices Via a Real-time Auction Like Google and Facebook
Anecdotal statistics are meaningless. Yahoo still controls the lion's share of the email market, and they don't even offer free POP3 access to your account.
The masking characters need to be more similar to the characters being typed. eg. ll is easily readable with letters like nrs, etc. in the background.
The goal is not to make money from the OS. IT was discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693861

Disclaimer: my submission and my blogpost.
Good to great to gone
I know that Google says that GCOS is "aimed at Netbooks", but I'm sure that that's supposed to be just the initial target platform. So I think that the criticism that the netbook market is so small as to be meaningless will turn out to be moot.

Also, the precedent for this is probably the SplashTop and the (upcoming) Crunchpad.
I don't think anyone can properly visualize 20 million of anything.
Unless you're both a surgeon and a programmer you probably shouldn't make sweeping statements like that.

I'm just a programming but I think a large portion of the bucks surgeons make is due to the expense and duration of medical school.
Google Chrome OS and Splashtop
I totally agree. But his article was aimed at non-Clojure (probably non-Lisp) programmers.
If you highlight this, it pretty much reveals what the password is.

I know that isn't what you're talking about, but it is close. I know that I couldn't read this even when I knew what I was typing until I highlighted it.
He may have learned that from a friend. Who here really remembers what they did during one of those all night coding sessions?
"I'm very sorry we conspired to use your private data to spam your friends. Here's a full refund, and now that our pants have been caught around our ankles, we will stop doing this."

Has a different ring to it. Good customer service will absolve accidental Bad Things(tm), not malicious acts.
1. Google owns the internet; search makes money, e-mail makes money, reader makes money, any website that uses AdSense makes money.

2. If there is more internet usage, Google makes more money.

----

Additionally, Google has a bunch of cool things that it wants to do but it can't because Javascript is a gimp piece of junk at the moment.

The more power Google gets, the harder it can push for its features.
I'm sure there is an equally reasonable explanation of costs and implications for your example.

There sure is. Had I defined a method (like you suggested), and just gone ahead and made my function variable point to that, the compiler would have enough information to infer types. In that case I would get away with the following:

var someFunction = (X) => entropy(X);

Just felt like contributing somethings which isn't on the HN daily list of languages, that's all :)
Eddie's El-Cheapo CIS (Continuous Inking System)
No, and that's my point. It was a unique situation created by the nature of the information at play and the people handling it. And you can make a federal case out of that happening, but it isn't an ominous Orwellian phenomenon.
Perhaps it's the function shorthand syntax that resembles Perl. This is closer to your macro's surface syntax:

(Σ (fn [i] (* (p i) (log (p i)))) x)

The tradeoff with your macro version is that when you want to leverage Σ as a first-class function (say, with comp or partial), you will end up with #() or (fn..) in the calling code. You can't escape it -- it's a natural way to write functional Lisp code.

It's no less readable than the rest of Clojure's API. You can reasonably expect a Clojure user to understand functions as arguments.
It uses cheap humor to badly comunicate its point, however valid it may be. So although i agree with some of the points, its my believe that at least on HN sending your message in a non trollish and reasonable(and yes, boring for a 14 year-old) way, is just as important as being rational and intelligent. Im a cynical jerk myself most of the time, but i avoid sharing my spicy personality on HN, because i KNOW that it gets in the way of good conversation, even though i don't take myself seriously(and i know the author doesn't either). See, a lot of the comments(including my two) on the submission are not about his points, but about his controversial delivery, and THAT is not good for HN.
This is a good thought - I had implemented character set matching (uppers to uppers, numbers, etc) before, but I worried that it made it almost too hard to read for the user.

You'll notice that I'm only using lowercase letters currently - that was an intentional choice as it seemed too obscured when using a fuller character set.

I'll give this another look though and see if there may be a good middle ground.
Let me just say, as retarded as I think this whole masking kerfluffle is, play with it or don't play with it, but if you don't mask passwords in your login box, expect to spend $10,000-$20,000 extra to your PCI auditors (and then restore password masking) when you decide to accept credit cards.
Uuhh, yeah. I don't think you'd need to be a programmer to that is altered. Also, I can tell from seeing a few shops in my time.
The pixels are a dead giveaway.
No, we can't. But "20 million cabinets of text" has more meaning to us than 10^15 bytes.
shhh don't tell asdlfj2sd33 about this comment (it'll set him over the edge)
If they let Apple and Microsoft control how people connect to the internet one day they might see themselves superseded. This is a first move into making linux more acceptable to the consumer and maybe keeping the desktop the way they want it.
2 years ago I made cl33n, a Linux live CD that boots Linux, connects to the net, runs the Matchbox window manager and launches Firefox- that's all it does. ChromeOS is "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." cl33n is "Mozilla Firefox running within a little-used windowing system on top of a Linux kernel". cl33n isn't unique, Webconverger and other great live CDs do a similar "make it easy for anyone to browse safely" job.

Google cancelled cl33n's AdSense account 8 days ago, right before they were due to make their first payment. The site and its small traffic & AdSense revenue hasn't changed for 2 years (am working on an update now, I got kinda busy with a startup ;)). If cl33n did Bad Things then it's been doing them for 2 years now. I wonder if Google will refund the money to the advertisers?

I've appealed but have not received a response from Google. I still don't know what cl33n did to incur Google's wrath.
And the fact that they work directly to save/improve/alter life whereas great software projects tend to be somewhat disconnected from the actual life saving thereby making their authors somewhat removed from that 'thing' that allows doctors to charge the big bucks.
Unwittingly perhaps (or necessarily), Microsoft has just done Google a huge favor. By virtue of Microsoft delivering a reasonably competitive search engine, Google is now in a much better position to show that they are not a monopoly. Back in the old days, IBM, then Microsoft liked keeping Apple around for the same reason.

Conversely, Google has completely dropped all pretext of its former hesitancy to tread directly on Microsoft's turf, releasing operating systems, mobile devices, browsers, hosted office applications, and working to obsolete Exchange (Google Wave).

In the end, there can be only one...
I think we should distinguish between notations that allow users to write incomprehensibly terse code and those that force them to. Only the latter are a problem, unless you're taking the protect-users-from-themselves approach to language design.

It's an interesting question whether there are any existing language constructs that force one to write unreadable code. I ended

http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html

by asking for examples, and I don't think I ever got any.
I live in Annapolis, MD. Here the police just started them in the downtown harbor area.
I wasn't sure if this is article should be taken seriously.

He pointed out that Google is targeting netbooks. He himself stated 11 million netbooks were sold last year and will be 39 million this year. The netbook category is a growing market that it would probably account to a substantial share in a few years.

Another is that "Chrome is shit." He probably has never used Chrome. I used the browser exclusively now unless I have a need to use Firebug in which I use Firefox instead.

I guess he's trying to be funny but he fell way short.
Yeah exactly, AS3 is turing complete? I know the ES4 was ditched cause of the typical corporate nonsense but I think eventually one language will emerge that has a lot of AS3's features - dynamic typing, objects for local state, lambda pointers, nice display list...
I like the idea.
But how about LCD screens where the angle changes everything?
Right now it's difficult to read from the side, but "a piece of cake" from above.
I have seen exactly two people with them in "real life" (not a rental).

The company I work for had a contest for our customers where we gave one away. I got to ride it around at work a bunch (I was the only one that could successfully ride it without risking a broken bone). The guy we gave it to drove it into his pool. Oops.

The other one belonged to a lady that used to live near me in Scottsdale, AZ. I know this because I almost hit her with my jeep one morning. I was pulling out of a parking lot, and she was coming the wrong direction down the sidewalk, moving MUCH faster than anything on the sidewalk should, and generally acting careless.

It has been pointed out already, but the segways don't really "fit" anywhere. They're too slow for the road, they're too fast for the sidewalk, and they're too big for the bike lanes.

They're well suited for malls and airports, but I can't really imagine myself using them anywhere else.
Or, he gave his eyetooth to see again.
By two-factor, do you mean things like SecurID tokens or do you mean the pictures and questions (what is your first pet's name?) that most US banks use?
Nothing has really changed. Microsoft just rebranded their search engine and Google continues to create products in an attempt to 'surround' MS for a battle in the future. And as always Uncle Sam is still watching the MS monopoly in operating systems, as well as Google's monopoly in search and neither has taken a hit to it's main business. Did I miss something?
>And the relevance of this to startups is?
It depends on how you define startup. If you are referring specifically to high tech startups, then the relevance is fairly small. If you use the term more generally for recently formed, small companies then many fields require immediate access to lawyers. And for many of those, the more and cheaper the lawyers they can get, the better. HDI, a company I would cite as a recent success story here, requires frequent access to lawyers as part of its business model.

>"barrier" has something to do with the relationship between cost and benefit. If the cost is 10% less but the benefit is 50% less.."

You are completely right. Perhaps I should have more cautiously said "While the cost of living here is unfortunately high, it is less so than Silicon Valley so that is clearly not necessarily a major barrier in itself."
Top sites running on Google App Engine (July 2009)
Haven't you learned? It's only bad when MS does it.
The military is amazing in a way that nuclear weapons are: Interesting science, but the application – for the lack of a better word – sucks.
You know there's a lot of medical software right? And I'm not just talking about record keeping. What do you think most high end medical and scientific instruments run on?
Your link is about death rates, not heart disease rates. Can you give me some graphs of heart disease rates over time with sources? There are plenty of studies which show that societies that eat more meat have higher rates of heart disease. I have yet to see a study showing the opposite which is why I said it's absurd.

I also read some more of the "articles" on that site you linked to and they were absurd on their face. Here is one example. They are attempting to refute the claim that animal farming is an efficient use of land.

"Much of the land used for animal farming, cannot be used for arable farming. With a rapidly expanding world population, a large proportion of whom are already starving, how can taking this land out of production help?"

This completely ignores the fact that large percentages of our corn and soy farming is used to feed animals. Ignoring this single data point either makes them ignorant or dishonest.
It's not the quantity, it's the quality that matters. Google has stated this publicly and while it's impressive they're indexing your site every few seconds, that might not be a good thing, or the 'right' thing for a search engine to be doing.

I could care less which search engine has the farthest reach (with few exceptions). What I (and most users I would suspect) really want is the best set of results that fulfill my query.
Goldman-Sachs using packet sniffing to game market?
I agree, there needs to be a giant leap in search interface or capabilities before anyone unseats Google.

Although I do hold out hope that a small underground 'open' competitor will emerge .... someday. A boy can dream can't he?
So... absolutely nothing to do with adsense then. Gotcha.
Really I mean either, or any other form of two-factor. Do you have experience with implementing one or the other?
well, the password can be copy pasted
It's the same game of chess, but the pace seems to be picking up, and the strategic value of each piece placement is coming more clearly into focus. The players are locked into their strategic choices, and are now becoming more reactionary. We'll see more forced moves before either side starts shedding a lot of pieces.
There is an argument in the whole masking argument that doesn't really have anything to do with security- it is that filling out a box and having the characters masked is a well known usability metaphor for users- implying the content should be kept hidden and implying (though it's not always true) that in the backend it is also kept secure. The metaphor comes from ATMs etc. All security aside, when the vast, vast majority of casual computer users finally have a computer metaphor nailed down it's usually very counterproductive to try to change it. Like trying to move the "File" menu to the far right of the menu bar for your next desktop app...
The population is not large ... I'd guess about 20,000 in cities like Melbourne and Syndey.

But basically, when you look at factors like: English speaking, good climate, good lifestyle, has an established and understandable immigration program - the choices narrow down to Canada and Australia. And we do not like winter, so there you have it.

I think it changed a bit since 2001 - now, I think, UK has established a migration program similar to AU. Don't know all details, but I would consider it if it existed in 2001. One big negative side of Australia is that it is so far away from everything.
Interior decoration ?

(No, not kidding - even muted reflections from walls and curtains may possibly play a large factor.)
Nice try, but I think this is the worst of both worlds. Still insecure in many situations (screencasts, presentations, or any time you might be recorded), and it's harder to character count than normal asterisks.
long article... moot point... unit & functional testing is important. My friend made an awesome analogy to the real world application here: http://app.arat.us/blog/?p=159
Here's an officers test:
http://aspirant.nu/

It's only in Swedish but most of it is self-explanatory. It's much more fun. Found this on their miltary website.
PayPal now offering micropayments
The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship
Mr Collins identifies five stages in the process of decline. Stage one is hubris born of success (possibly brought on by reading the case study of the firm in one of Mr Collins’s earlier books).

Snark alert (with bonus frown on apostrophe style).

“Our research shows that if you’ve been practising the principles of greatness all the way along, you should get down on your knees and pray for severe turbulence, for that’s when you can pull even further ahead of those who lack your relentless intensity.” Amen.

Damn it, now that we're imagining there's no religion, we get religion in business (the "relentless intensity", not the knees bit), religion in the environment, religion in food, health, computers ... it would be simpler to just use the real thing.

(Paging G.K.Chesterton and Pierre Boule to the white courtesy phone.)
Ask HN: Which press release distribution service?
Which press release distribution services provide the best bang-for-buck for consumer focused techreleases?
I'm based in Canada, but the only audience restrictions are english speaking, broadband, and privacy concerned/interested.
Your thoughts on my gift registry app, GiftyWeddings.com?
Why ServInt (competitor) stands behind Rackspace
Maybe it's Google's way of saying "we're not even gonna go there"
Two MUST Watch Videos On Impact Marketing And YouTube Video Optimization
Marketing is the sole of getting your product, service or website online seen. We now that as webmasters and online marketers. But the problem most just starting out is where to get started.
I agree, it's pretty easy to read the text if you zoom in on the field: http://skitch.com/joelf/bayjs/halfmask
Two wheeled robocars and the Twill
Chrome has become my default browser, second place is Firefox. and i've seen increase in chrome share in my site, up from 3% to 7% for the past 6 months.
It's interesting to think about the Cost Benefit analysis of testing. I can say from my own personal experience that test driven development actually speeds up my results and it seems that I get a test for free.
Outages like this are a really good reminder why you should not have all your servers in a single colocation if you plan on weathering any kind of crisis.
WebObjects sliced from 10.6—but prognosis of death premature
dupe:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693786
Maybe if you're a liberal arts major. I had three offers within two weeks of beginning my job search in January. This is NOT a bad time to be a CS graduate.
But how do you type the Σ? Don't do stuff like that... In one project I had to use a templating language that used "<<" as a single character (I still can't type it) instead of <% %> like all the other languages in the world. I ended up using copy and paste for that character whenever I had to edit the templates. Needless to say I enjoyed that project tremendously.

Really don't do that - try to stick to ASCII in the source code please.
Sorry for the guardian, but no news was suppressed, a persons life was protected.

Your really have to weigh these things carefully.

That not everybody has 'friends in high places' ensuring such a treatment is maybe a reason to review the policy of WP, but the word 'censorship' is not even applicable. News is important, human lives are more important.
Impact Ventures: Y Combinator for Canada?
I'm calling bullshit on the last stat. Where does he source this from?
Style versus substance. Slick but crap. To echo psyklic, I felt the production was great, but the instructions, implementation and interaction were shockingly poor.