skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Entertaining easter egg at the bottom of the quiz section :

"Answer to last month's quiz : 42" :)
>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...

Well yeah like others have been saying, python is more attractive to new users is probably partly why it's more popular. You don't need to work as hard to understand its idioms, it's more readable by newbies (by anyone), etc.
Lucene helps a lot, but searching for technical information is different from general information retrieval. That general purpose search engines are inadequate are stackoverflow's reason for being, after all.

It just takes testing and tuning with real data to get it right.
Top Web Bug Trackers on the Web
Hey, now we can judge the entire Python community by tdavis's comments.

:)
Gmail gets Drag-and-Drop
Lessons from Joost
Don't make them think
I got into this a while back. One of my.. things was used for the splash screen.

http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/view.php?id=207
"Issues" is putting it mildly. Prepare to be treated as an accomplice, if not worse, if the traffic is traced to your IP address.
I don't think they had sinister or non-genuine intentions; I think they were deluded by their previous successes that this would be a clear win, and went fast into it without considering the obvious (to us now, at least). They were mistakenly trained to think that P2P was their technical-advantage hammer that they could hit every nail with.
I question the validity of posting this to HN for the following reasons:

1) As mattyb points out, it was already submitted as a link to HN over a year ago.
2) It's a fairly old article.
3) Most hackers have already read this. Thoroughly.
Corollary to 3) Hackers generally know enough about asking questions the "right way" to invalidate the requirement of reading this except for the novelty alone.
4) The very individuals who need to read this won't. Furthermore, they'll be offended if you link it to them.
5) The only thing more obnoxious than someone asking "can u plz halp me" is the person who maliciously links this article for the purposes of inflaming the clueless for their own enjoyment. Subsequently, "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" is one of the most over-linked yet genuinely-useful documents that can almost instantaneously derail an otherwise productive conversation.

On the other hand, fledgling hackers may not be aware of the mores and folkways of online interaction and this information may be valuable to them.

I have an example that has happened on more than one occasion. First, some background: I consider myself a rather helpful person from time to time (when I'm in a charitable mood, at least) and may lurk various forums in search of people asking questions that need answers. It entertains me.

Yes, there are indeed those people who aren't willing to do any work themselves. Conversely, there are some who are willing to do useful work but haven't a clue how to ask (correctly) or where to start. If I am attempting to assist someone who falls into the latter category with their dilemma, the absolute most annoying thing someone can do is post a link to "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way." It derails the conversation and generally inflames the individual I'm trying to help.

So please, for those of you who haven't had any exposure to "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way," exercise restraint if you consider posting this to a message board. If the individual asking the question is a fool and has no intention of doing anything without outside assistance (i.e. they're asking in the hopes you'll do the work for them), by all means--link it! If the person isn't asking a "smart" question but genuinely seems interested in solving his or her own problem--don't. The latter is especially true if you interject into an ongoing conversation populated in part by those of us who are attempting to lend aid. In such a case, by linking this article you will be wasting our time as well if the person asking the question grows increasingly more frustrated and angry.

Having said that, I'd encourage you to read the article in its entirety if you haven't already. Eric Raymond, IIRC, has a section on how to politely point out the error of one's ways. Rather than blatantly linking the article the next time someone asks a stupid question, consider following the advice of the very article you contemplated linking!
That's probably why you're not wealthy, which is fine, but it's something to bear in mind.
Steven Pemberton: The Future of Code
"Ruby lived fast and died young. "

Sweet! I am making a living using a zombie, undead, from-beyond-the-grave programming language!

I better hook up that USB Ouija board and get coding.
National Association of Math Circles
SBCL make-instance optimizations for non-constant class names
At both of my last two jobs, I helped switch my team from svn to git. In both cases, at least of us first started using git-svn. Other developers saw how we could use this to edit our commit history before pushing to the server; create lightweight topic branches to separate feature work from bug fixes; push changes from one personal repository to another for things like code reviews; and do better merges and cherry-picks between SVN branches than SVN itself.

Other advantages to highlight are:
* Way better support for branches and merging, especially long-lived branches or any branches that include cherry-picked changes. (SVN 1.5 improved things a lot, but we found that it still broke merges occasionally while git was rock-solid.)
* Great tools for offline/disconnected development (including commit, rollback, branch, history viewing, git-bisect).
* Increased speed of many common operations (viewing the log, merging and diffing across branches, switching branches, etc.)
This is (mostly) unrelated to the article directly, but it made me think of a cool HN feature-enhancement:

Create a pseudo-ranking of submitted stories, based on the content itself. Submissions where the content abuses tired words or phrases like "rock star" would drop in this auto-ranking algorithm. By contrast, stories which appear to have links to valuable content or supporting data would gain ranking.

I know, it would probably be difficult to implement in real-life, but it would be a kick-ass feature and save a lot of people from clicking on shallow links.
That's what I got from it.
"I was a Perl hacker so Python was the obvious choice for me"

Interesting. I was a Perl hacker, and Ruby was the obvious choice for me.
Apparently they are rolling it out over a period of time. You should get it today though.
Why I don't like Twitter and Why it is successful? | Krishnamoorthy Blogs
"As far as I know all rubyists permanently abandon REXML approximately 20 minutes into their first coding session involving anything to do with XML."

No, not really.

Some do, I'm sure. I've had great success with it when I needed it.
If you go see tweetknot.com, it resembles twitter a lot

So, if you are a short messaging service, you can only use certain colors as your background?
I think this is great, though I found myself confused by why I can't drag emails from one inbox to another. (I have multiple inboxes enabled.) No biggie though, hopefully that will be rolled out later as well.
Customer Development: My First Steps
confusing poll - are you asking if they're unemployable (like in the title) or employable (like in the text)?
So this is my first stab at going through the customer development process.
it steals your money by advertising competitors products right next to yours

This is the same situation as, say, billboards. They owners don't produce any content, but they still make advertising revenue. (Other techniques include advertising on the back of airline boarding passes, direct mail, etc.)

Turns out that there is no rule or fundamental property of the universe that requires you to produce content in order to sell advertising space.
or a is negative.
This is all true, but if A LOT of people suddenly start running will the police knock on everyone's door?

Will the administration take any part in this, will they ask law enforcement to back off on tor exit nodes? They were tech savy enough to ask Twitter to reschedule their planned down time.

In any case, the EFF should publish a legal guide in what to do in case the police do come knocking on your door because your IP showed up in some crime related log.
Of course, this will run through the whole list, no matter what...

def is_constant(l):
return reduce(lambda x, y: x and (y == l[0]), l, True)
The problem is that learning to think this way in general makes you habitually write things like x >> 8 instead of x / 256, which makes your code hard to read for no benefit if you're using a compiler that was written sometime in, oh, the past 20 years.

EDIT: sometimes x >> 8 is clearer, if you're actually dealing with packing bits into words, but I've just recently seen it done when the code really "meant" division.
" think that libraries especially mature and massive libraries, or lack thereof, is holding ruby back."

JRuby FTW.

Yes, there are downsides to sitting on the JVM, but for anything other than one-off scripts, or where start-up speed is really important, JRuby gives the best of both worlds[0]: Ruby syntax with JVM libraries.

[0] Clearly if you do not care for Ruby syntax then this is not a win. I believe, though, that JRuby is more advanced and stable than Jython. But the Jython folks are quite capable for continuing to kick ass, so that will improve.
I think I was happier not knowing :/

It's not secrecy as much as it's mystery
Structure Synth http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/ works similarly in 3D. I've used it with SunFlow http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/ to make some pretty neat images relatively easily:

http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/111770/1/grfx?h=7e3f2e (view full-size for best effect).
Mentoring Programs - A Guiding Hand from Big Business to Small
My iPhone App: Power Happy Hour
I've been following HN for a few years now and really love the solid community and great commentary.

My most recent project is an iPhone app called Power Happy Hour, which shows you all the happy hour specials happening near you location. I've submitted it to Apple for review and I'm waiting for their decision, but I wanted to share it with the HN community in the mean time!

You can view the screen shots at the website and sign up to the email list if you want to be notified when it's officially available via the iTunes store. Please blog/twitter it up if you like the idea!

http://www.powerhappyhourapp.com
Hmm, that sucks. I'd like to do something helpful, and turning your Twitter icon green is truly the least you can do

I was hoping that running a Tor node would be a more viable, more useful alternative.
the bunny image title still says "Click the button below..." :]
First Came Gizmodo, Then Engadget. Now, GDGT.
Sudoku Puzzles Generating, Pragmatic Way
I've made it more clear.
Semi-experts: profit by saving us time
This isn't a fireside chat; it's a report on a report of a talk he gave.

Here's the original:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/listening_to_m...

I'm surprised Ive mentioned Jobs, since Apple doesn't want to associate themselves too strongly with him these days.
I'm pretty sure the cryptanalysis is equally applicable. The summary (and maybe the paper) don't mention AES-128, but the attack uses "boomerang attacks, which are based on the recent idea of finding local collisions in block ciphers". This might affect AES-256 more than AES-128 because there are more chances for local collisions, but it will still be stronger.
Forget all those options. If you can tap into that person's passion with what you're doing, hire them.

Besides, there is no such thing as long-term employment anymore. A talented person could create immense value for you in a month that'll pay dividends down the road.
Except it's not really a "fitting conclusion" to the article: almost all the other factors the article cites are irrelevant or inconsequential. "Too big, too fast", "Too spread out", and so on are just quibbles: the fundamental problem was a lack of compelling content. The rest is just incidental, IMHO.
Are You Going to San Francisco?
Was it difficult getting admitted to a master's program in CS without a technical bachelor's degree? My impression is that technical grad schools only want applicants with top-notch technical skills.
the long term relationships and connections you develop from existing clients are the most essential things.

gettig your first clients is the hardest part.

2 things that can help you get some initial clients:

1) create a blog that shows your knowledge, skills and expertise.

2) side project(s) that demonstrate what you can do.

if your blog and projects look impressive it can be a way around that initial hurdle of getting your first clients who will be the ones to refer you or repeat hire you.

don't use price point as a way to lure clients unless the context is right for that. most of the time people are looking for someone good ahead of cheap. someone good does it right, and efficiently.
1. It has been a looong time since I read _Being and Time_, but I don't think that's what Heidegger had in mind.

2. Could it be that we're on a 35-year, say generational, cycle? It's about that long since _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ came out.

3. Don't underestimate the trades' exposure to the larger economy. In Washington, DC, where the economy remains relatively stronger, the best builders stay busy. But I hear it is not so elsewhere, and here a lot of the less-skilled manual workers are out of work.
I think you've manifested nicely a good business idea. I tried the web version as well as the Mac download and although I didn't send anything to a printer the Print Preview in each case looked functional. I like how in both versions you: de-dupe the word list, give the user a Cards Per Page option, and make the center square and game title customizable.

One small observation I have about the web version is that in Step 1 the "words you've added" section felt a little redundant. The user already sees a nice preview of the Bingo card as it is being updated. So each word the user adds to the card eventually appears on the screen three times. Since the Bingo card updates lag the "words you've added" updates the resulting user experience is a little confusing. But functionally everything I tried in this step worked, so good job on the word-lists controller - methods new (post) and edit (put) handled my mistakes (e.g., too few words) flawlessly.

Steps 2 and 3 in the web version made sense and the resulting pdf I downloaded looked great. You make a decent case for registering during step 3. At first I didn't understand the line "use 604 bingo activities any time you want to" but I soon realized that's a reference to your library of premade cards, which I tried and thought was a super feature.

When you introduce this web version into the home screen layout, you might want to pump it as the #1 option above the PC and Mac versions. Otherwise it might be too confusing because while the copy on your site is well-written it's pretty verbose. I would want to abstract out some of your sales pitch and whittle down the benefits - although this is maybe personal taste. As you iterate you might try to get the "a picture is worth a thousand words" screenshots higher in the flow. Also you should update those screenshots because the end result today looks significantly better than your images. That may be affecting your conversion.

As I understand you, the sole reason for purchasing a license is to remove the watermark and footnote. I notice however that neither the watermark nor the footnote seeps into the Bingo card. Since people are already using a scissors or a paper cutter to trim the (multiple cards per page) hardcopy it seems trivial for them to also crop away your branding. Assuming it's technically feasible I might inconvenience the nonpayers a bit more by positioning my watermark directly on the cards. But I see you have 1,800 paying customers - so it is me who should be asking you for suggestions.
I just noticed that the title of this thread has now been changed from one that accuses Techcrunch of stealing a story to the one that blame it of misleading. Unfortunately, it's still not the Techcrunch post but the title of this thread that is misleading.

As much as I dislike Techcrunch, it didn't mislead anyone in the story. It just didn't disclose the name of a website owner that shamelessly ripped the hell off Twitter and instead chose to refer him as a 'third party developer'.

In a way, Techcrunch is doing you a favor by maintaining anonymity.

Edit: The title of this thread seems to be a work-in-progress. changing every other while. The original title was: Techcrunch steals story from tweetknot
Entrepreneur types are willing to do things they don't like to remain solvent.
So basically, he wants to ban the basic underlying concept behind the internet as it was conceived in the first place?

It is as if he said he wants to prosecute football players for battery when they tackle an opponent. By stepping on the field in a uniform you are agreeing to play inside the rules of the game. Linking is one of the rules of the game on the internet.

Couldn't we use the legal argument that posting something online without taking further steps to password protect it or what have you is implied consent for the content to be linked to?
You'll get that in a Perl Golf competition but the trend these days it towards much more readable and maintainable code. Which is why we have things like Moose (a better way to do objects).
I'm really not a fan of pre-collect payment info trials, but if you do this, make sure you state that it is possible to cancel your account via the website. I will never sign up for one when I suspect they'll make me call to cancel.
Not quite, it's more like letting people develop film using your equipment. There's a lot more you can do to prevent it at that point.
The Looming Facebook Privacy Fiasco
The Extinction Oscillator
This article doesn't really address anything particular about the design characteristics of the A310 other than that there is a history of pilot error incidents involving this aircraft -- like all other aircraft.

Also, a radar altimeter is capable of providing accurate altitude over water as it is over terrain.

On a tangent, there is no evidence to support the claim that Aeroflot has a "third world" safety record. It is quite the opposite during the post-Soviet era.
Creative commons and the arxiv give you a very simple solution.

1. Upload to the arxiv under a creative commons license.

2. Submit, and post to your webpage.

3. If the journal ever demands you take the paper down, do so. Then download the creative commons version from the arxiv and post that (or just link to it).
I just got out of my 12 year old startup and took a full time, real job. I told them upfront I would probably last 6-9 months, and we are planning my projects accordingly.

I have to say it is the most relaxing thing I have ever done in the last 12 years. I come to work, do the work, socialize with other employees at lunch, do more work, and then go home. The magic is that when I go home, I don't have any other responsibilities. I don't care about sales, hitting payroll, leases, bank covenants, customer issues...

I can definitely see how people could be lulled into doing this year after year.

The other plus side is I get to see how another business is being run (truthfully this is my first real job working for someone). I also get an 'employee' perspective, something that is invaluable. I get to see their view of management and infrastructure.

I would say it's a great way for an entrepreneur to regroup and get perspective. (my experience is a bit skewed since I'm working for a quite amazing company.. though if it were less functional that would be a learning experience of a different kind)
Astounding.

So now that the internet is fast enough, there is no longer a need for desktop OS or even the desktop web browser. Just stream the clicks and the videos. Wow.
Around the house is my grandfather's ca. 1911 yearbook from a midwestern engineering school. I was entertained to read a two page item by the yearbook staff calling for a better sports program to draw attention to the school. The school survives, but probably remains in D III.
I don't think so, based on historical evidence. At least it doesn't seem to be like before- and after-45 or other midlife age. From all great theory builders, we rather see like this age being closer to late twenties. They start out by solving some minor problems, often ambitiously taking the labourous technical ones, and then boom, out of nowhere new stage-setting theory, not necessarily much related to previous work. These frameworks open new hard problems which then are becoming mainstream, while frameworks that emerge by accretion of facts and experience hardly make such impact. I give Alain Connes as an example; man steadily, for most of his academic life i.e. last 30 years, outlines theories at a rate of one per two or three years.
One of the best blog posts I read in a while...
He never completed Hackety Hack.
I've found it quite difficult to keep classes having only one responsibility. In programming _examples_ it is easy to see what the responsibility is and what is supposed to be another class' responsibility.

But programming large software systems the responsibilities are not apparent at start. You shape your abstractions and terminology for the software as you are writing it and as you find subtle details.

This problem is what got me sold on test-driven development: Actually writing a test for every method of a class clarifies so much about what the responsibility is, and what could be refactored out into a separate unit.

I cant explain it, but for me unit testing has become so much more of a thought tool while prototyping and developing than an actual testing tool once the code is written.

My hunch is that for writing testable code, you want to make interfaces small and simple, so you try to pinch them everywhere, to make unit tests simpler. As you do that you see what has very low (minimally required) coupling and thus can be separate units.
Ask HN: Will you please screw me? VC style.
You know that nightmare VC scenario people talk about where their executive team takes over, and kicks the founder out with nothing but a minor stake in the company or demotes them into a minor role like "lead scientist"? Is there a way to skip straight to that? Is there some flavor of consultant you can hire to do that?

I don't need capital, but I want to run another business like I want to chew off my big toes.
Here is the active link: http://www.powerhappyhourapp.com
2^119 certainly seems less than 2^128.

I skimmed the paper and they don't mention AES-128, and I assume that if it worked on AES-128 they would have mentioned it, but they don't. So maybe. Probably would need to email the authors and ask.
I don't know if there's proof of whether they are available because of competitive pressures from the open source stack or from Oracle, IBM, etc., but I think we can all agree that competition is a good thing in general.

Still, my point is that while the open source stack is a smarter choice for many, many projects, between free versions of closed-source software and initiatives like Microsoft BizSpark, startup cost shouldn't really be the deciding factor.