skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say the money quote is:

"To put it concisely, I think that’s what a lot of critiques of “magic” really boil down to: the notion that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Accepting this can be tough, but I think it’s a necessary part of becoming a good programmer; if you don’t have a certain sense of discipline and respect for the power you’re wielding, well, you might up cloning dinosaurs and getting eaten by them when the power goes out."

Going beyond Ruby, I do have this criticism for a number of the really dynamic languages. Doing one of the mighty wizardly things might work, but it often has side effects that only a wizard will know. Sure, hacking on the Array class in Javascript can be cool, but breaks things like property enumeration in "weird" ways (well, I understand them but a newbie won't)... are you really really sure that your awesome new functionality couldn't have just been done with a simple function that takes an array as the first argument? Or did you actually need to extend Array?

Sometimes the answer is, yes, you needed to extend Array. OK then. But it frequently isn't. Wizardly code tends to tie your code up in snarls; one minute you're wizarding this, the next that, then the wizard hunks start interacting, then all hell breaks loose and you get an incomprehensible mess, when it could probably have just been some functions with a bit more verbosity on the calling side. I know; I've been through this pattern at least two big times, including the refactoring back into functions, and I consider this a shameful admission, justified only by "I was young and we all are young at some point"... and I can't help but notice I rarely lose much of significance when I do the refactoring back into functions.
I think it's called "attention grabbing" - the reason they're mentioned is to sell newspapers / gain viewers for the ads.

99% accuracy is not exactly great either.
Bullshit. While I'm sure that super attractive people can intimidate a disproportionate share of the opposite (or same!) sex. The lack of romance requires that in addition to being super attractive they also refuse to be the one who breaks the ice.

Proper headline should be attractiveness + refusal to take the first step leads to fewer dating opportunities.
I don't think this makes any sense for Apple (though it might for some other companies).

The fundamental flaw is that people are already paying Apple quite tidy sums for something that does the same task as a netbook. (I subscribe to the notion that netbooks should be permanently net-connected, so I'm talking iPhone, not iPod Touch).

All the keyboard shenanigans doesn't sound like Apple at all, particularly when you consider that they could have done exactly this with the iPhone but haven't. In fact it seems they may have gone out of their way to stop bluetooth keyboards (or alternative text entry devices) from working with the iPhone.
No. With the holds at gates and taxi times, even if the scheduled flight time were 10 minutes, my experience is that flights usually have 1 hour of waste: taxiing, waiting in line to take off, waiting in a holding pattern to land, waiting for the previous flight at the arrival gate to leave.
Each team just manages the easter eggs in their own product, it's not like there is the Easter Egg Department which has goals for the quarter of x new easter eggs reaching y million people.

So in this case it's the same team that handles all the "did you mean" stuff.
As a total aside, something I didn't know about until far too recently: hitting 'm' in a Gmail conversation thread mutes it, meaning replies are automatically archived. It doesn't always seem to work, but I find it awfully useful.
I wonder if creating an association with a pretty face is longer lasting if he/she is looking right at you, so that even though the initial focus on the product is weaker, the longer lasting association of beauty and the product pay-off more.
What worries me isn't YouTube but the chicken and egg situation where you can't make web-based business apps using modern web features because some folks are locked to IE6, and no-one will upgrade from IE6 because there's no compelling business applications.

Obviously this is happening, but obviously IE6 is slowing things down in this area even more than the open consumer web.
Why? It's clever and it symbolizes Google's bubbly, geeky corporate personality. If I had to decide between working at two otherwise equal companies, I'd happily choose the one that encourages this type of playfulfulness. Small things like this matter a lot.
"The purpose is to award the most miserable employee in the world"
Lets get creative - the cubicle need not be messy to be miserable.

It could be of a MS employee with a PC with a blue screen on it.
You've got it, it absolutely is like that! It's such a subtle thing when you talk about it to people who obviously are trying to achieve things in a different mode, they'll say things like "come on, pull yourself together - you are simply not ambitious enough!" which makes you feel even more miserable and not productive. So we keep staying up all night - for a short period I managed to be able to rise at exactly 5 AM in the morning which was great but I endured it just for a month or so. You need discipline but you get much of your health back. I am working to get back in the habit again. Although nighttime has some additional quality for me which morning time doesn't seem to offer as much which is simply a higher frequency of creativity sparks (and maybe a higher error rate as well ;))
I disagree.

Microsoft has had to make these community-oriented changes because they have been losing the community. It is, and has been, necessary for that bottom line for these changes to come about. They are finally come to realize, at a more fundamental level, that they need us more than we need them. And we need them less and less, every day.

As long as OSS keeps pushing the envelope, both technically and in mind-share, Microsoft will keep their promises, expressed and implied.
Thanks! will get that fixed.
Friendster founder on the rise and fall of America's first big social network
Douglas R. Hofstadter: A Person Paper on Purity in Language
If a guy talks to >>1 girl per week, almost any guy will get over rejection pretty quickly. The a priori fear of failure is much worse than the actual thing.
A data point in support of this: Extreme nerd in 20s, never dated, got a few dates in my 30s, and then everything reversed when I turned 40.

I think a big factor is just that I never learned how to play the game until around age 40. In my 20s, I was more interested in stuff like arithmetic-logic units. For a man, knowing how to approach women and "lead the interaction" makes a lot more difference than "attractiveness". Women are in a very different situation.
Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after 'violating' GPL
What I like best about the table of contents is that:

"Hmm, maybe it's time we mentioned Lists"

is chapter 9. Good way to escape the programming urban legend that "In Lisp, lists are the only data structure."
Thanks for sharing. Great find.
Splashtop: Push for 'instant-on' web search
I might. I'd at least try it if given a substantial discount. Flying coach is already an uncomfortable experience. I wouldn't be surprised if short flights were actually more comfortable standing.
I suspect that if RyanAir offers this they will nickel and dime those standing passengers for everything to recoup the lost ticket revenue. For example, in the standing configuration they effectively eliminate the overhead storage, that's one more bag passengers will have to check.
I don't know about genetic stuff, I'm just trying to make a relative statement between calculus and number theory.

Who knows what causes it, but there are a lot of smart 15 year olds who are less good at math than they are at most things. If those people really work their asses off at calculus, it works better than working their asses off at number theory. That's because calculus contains more memorization and less problem-solving.
MeGUI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/) is my favourite.
Because we tend to deep fry and eat anything not nailed down.
Keep in mind that it works the other way, too: extreme attractiveness can also be a repellent for women. Especially if the guy has a big ego, is a player, etc. (not many nerds are, but some are). When it comes to relationships, most women I know of prefer loyalty over physical attractiveness, even if they say otherwise.

Of course, there is also the issue of persistence, which cannot be entirely discounted.
Why Are Writers for 'Time' so Patronizing?
Yes, using a stock photograph in your site design means that you're running a scam. Honest folk take their own advertising photographs.

Give me a break.
Awesome pun.
Kind of a dumb submission. The South is dominated by two ethnic groups, except for "hot and humid" Florida which also has a relatively low obesity rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-An...

http://www.sogoodblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/obesity...
Doesn't "shift+i" do the trick?
Yeah, there is something off about the article. Too much math, not enough reality.

The fact is, beautiful women get approached. A lot. Like, to the point where they find it annoying. Tens of times a day. This is why they get skilled at brushing men off: so much practice. The reason beautiful women give off a "don't talk to me" vibe is to reduce the number of approaches to something manageable--and filter down them approachers to just the true social alphas.

No doubt there are a few beautiful women who don't get approached. There is something else going on in those cases besides probability theory. They're also giving off a vibe that makes them unattractive, or they're living in a community of nerds. Hell, even alpha nerds approach beautiful women.
Too hot? Come on. I live in the "fat South" and just run first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Just like everyone else who's physically active here does.

I can't believe the author settled on "too hot" instead of "too uneducated". I guess the weather offends less people.

The South is both the poorest and least educated area of the country. Educated people eat better and exercise more because they know better.
It seems like the article neglects to define what a 'short flight' is.

Without stating how long you'd have to stand, any answer would be worthless.
OK - exceptions confirm the rule, I guess ;-)
The author's opinion of his friend's attractiveness may be exaggerated.
Sorry, but do you have any statistics to support what I assume you're saying, that black people are more obese on average?
I live in Mississippi, and every time I leave the South I see a very noticeable difference in how people look. It has gotten much worse in the past 10 years. I recall growing up and going to the store, the electric carts were always parked in the front of the store. Now they are always in use by someone too large to walk. It's very sad.

And I believe this article confirms my mental state, I do go running when its 100 degrees outside.
Rackspace goes Open Source with APIs
Understood and I totally agree! I wouldn't expect any less intellectual honesty from a HN user.
Most beautiful women in their teens and 20s do have boyfriends. That doesn't prevent men from approaching.

Regular, socially outgoing men approach. It's nerds who talk themselves out of it. Think of salesmen. Salesmen start conversations with strangers all the time, and turn them into sales or network connections or women they sleep with that night. Starting conversations with strangers is for them the bread and butter of life. For nerds, it isn't.
Software development: Engineering or Craftsmanship?
Think about it this way: when you attempt to unsubscribe, you are in effect telling the mass marketer that this is a live email address. As in, there's an actual human being reading these emails.

Such live email addresses are very valuable to spammers. So this feature is susceptible to abuse by spammers providing the unsubscribe functionality, but only prioritizing the attempted unsubscribers higher in their mailing lists.

So built into their unsubscribe attempt, there needs to be a way to very strictly penalize those who pretend to allow unsubscribes while ignoring them to harvest more email addresses. Hence, they call it "unsubscribe and mark as spam" because any other email messages you receive from that sender will be marked as spam with extreme prejudice.
America's 10 most wanted botnets
I thought that this seemed odd till I realized that it was RyanAir. Those guys will do anything to cut costs.
Three words..."deep fried Twinkies!"

I'm sure sweet tea doesn't help either.
this, mostly.

its the culture of the food. not just deep frying, but, for example, we'll put two sticks of butter in or onto anything. sweet tea at every meal. etc..

the things the article mentioned certainly have some consequences on the situation, but its more about the things we stuff into our faces than other things.
RyanAir already nickels and dimes passengers. How would this be different?
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:PfhBNYC8YsEJ:weight-loss...

Black men are slightly less obese, black women significantly more obese. It's not just blacks but Scotch-Irish, for which I doubt there are statistics available, but the Bill Clinton/Boss Hogg body shape is not unusual.
Well, it always have been 10 years away.
WordPress 2.8.2 Upgrade Information | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
then add another button that just unsubscribes
That's a rumor now, but we'll see the real numbers with the SEC filings.

Also, I asked Tony if Zappos was profitable about 4 months ago and he said yes.
Keep clicking and let us know if you see it unwind.
In order to put them in volume production, you need a well-defined market and a distribution strategy

Dean's frustrations with the realpolitik of the world are somewhat surprising.

A man of his intellect should have understood a long time ago that broken states are not going to be fixed by technology. But I suppose he's also a great idealist and that would color his view of the world.

The bottom line is no matter how great your technology for clean water or dung powered engines is, it can't fix a broken state run by thugs and criminals.

Truly fixing the world is much harder then building sterling engines. But it is possible. The proper reaction is not to get frustrated but to change strategies.

Dean is smart and while he may not be as experienced with 3rd world politics as he is with technology, his wealth and intellect could make a GREAT difference IF he truly looked at realpolitiks as an engineering challenge, rather then get frustrated and discouraged by it.
RackSpace Opens The Cloud
IMO the sooner splashtop dies a death the better. I dont know if anyone has used it but it's horrid and is going to put consumers off of the "windows alternatives" market.

For a start it uses FireFox 2 - it goes downhill from there.

Actually I had a lengthy debate about this on a forum jsut the other week. We cant see a useful market for this. Web-access is very nice in an instant-on environment, but it's not a very feature rich experience. And eventually you'll probably have to boot to the OS (and will you bother to reboot).

Now if you put together an instant-on package that was featured around multimedia; music, tv and DVD playback that would be killer!
Five Features from Mercurial That Would Make Git Suck Less
This analysis is just wrong. There is no shame or misery in finding out that Carol already has a partner. The really bad outcome is that she's totally alone, but she finds you such a dork, she humiliates you with a zinger that everyone around can hear. Also, women give their phone number to more than one man. They don't have a "first man only" rule.

The reason a lot of guys, especially nerds, won't approach Carol is that they see her as holding higher social status than they do, so it feels extremely uncomfortable. The "popular" (high-status) guys will approach her confidently and playfully. People tend to group with others of approximately the same social status.

To really learn about this stuff, you have to put the math book away and socialize with people.
Sure, The U.S. Has A Lot Of Click Fraud, But At Least We’re Not Vietnam
[Ask HN Commuters]: What do you do on your commute to work?
I recently moved to Brooklyn, NY and commute via the B or Q train to 21st Street every day. It takes about 20-25 minutes, and normally is pretty difficult to move around making it difficult to read from a book. I wish it was possible to predict when I will get a seat, as I would consider purchasing a Netbook for the commute and do real work.

I've considered using the time to catch up on RSS feeds, though the lack of any real way to get an Internet connection would make this next to impossible (since some feeds of course only post summaries) unless there was some sort of offline mode in the feed reader. Are there any apps for an iPod Touch that might work in this case?

Alternatively or, in conjunction with, I'd love to find a few semi-weekly/daily podcasts that can be listened through entirely on one trip (again, 20-25 minutes), though I wouldn't mind some video podcasts that were short, say 5 minutes or so.

So, Hacker News, what would you suggest? Do you know of such apps in the App Store to read offline content? Do you have any recommendations for (video | audio) podcasts that fit the criteria of being short and interesting? Thanks.

Edit: asking more directly now
Artist Finds His Own Music Video Removed From YouTube, Lashes Out On Twitter
Apple Claims 91% of $1,000+ PC Market Revenue in June
Merb with Postgres on the backend, jQuery + jQuery UI on the front, served by Nginx reverse-proxied to Thin. The website is statically generated using Jekyll.
The Downside of a Good Idea: T.M.I.
I'm building an app in a related space (project planning for event planners) and bumped into a potential competitor on a message board. Turns out he is more in your space than mine. We got on Skype and he gave me a tour of his app. If you want to see the feature set of a mature event registration app for enterprise, you should shoot him a note and request a demo. Looks like your market is decidedly not enterprise, but rather casual event hosts, but you might pick up a cool feature or two.

http://event-master.com/regis.html

Simon was the guy who gave me the tour.
I know nothing about this area, but Mums just asked me to help her and her business partner put together a DVD demonstrating their healthcare treatment techniques. They are "leading edge" in their field and need visual before and after documentation to convince others, particularly the mainstream medical community, that their results are real. To be clear, this isn't "crystal magnets and stuff"; it's advanced physical therapy and neuro-physiological techniques invoking neuro-plasticity and the like.

Nothing too fancy required of the video, except that faces need to be blurred. Does anyone know of an open source / low or zero cost editor that can do that reliably?

Once, some years in the past, she spent some thousands on a professionally produced videotape, but was underwhelmed with the results and a bit overwhelmed at the price tag given the relative simplicity of her editing needs (although I can see face blurring as a multi-hour "target shoot" kind of exercise, for the editor). Thus, this time her "computer literate" son has been drafted.

EDIT: She works a lot with disadvantaged children. Good work, but there's not tons of money in it. So, she's not just being cheap. And as I'm between jobs, I'm avoiding expenses, myself.
They said they polled 120K people on their website to gauge the sentiment for this idea. Isn't it true that polls that depend on self-selection are very biased? That obviously doesn't completely invalidate the idea, but isn't it a bit much to use it as supporting evidence?

The answer was an overwhelming 'yes' if the tickets were free. Two-thirds of respondents said they’d stand on flights of less than an hour if their tickets were free; 42% were willing to do so for tickets that were half-off.

In this case, who knows, it may be only that the hardcore, frequent fliers responded to the poll and that the majority of fliers actually hate the idea.
We eat food that was appropriate when you worked outside for 12 hours a day. We also live in rural areas so you have to drive everywhere.
Nothing, since my 'work" is 3 feet away.

I'd suggest "reading" audiobooks. Or if you don't get motion sick, reading actual books.
It is not clever. It's an old, old joke.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2049834_keep-idiot-busy.html
As long as companies will coddle these guys we'll never get rid of IE6. Corporate environments won't just get rid of IE6 as they upgrade their PCs since they go out of their way to install it to run their own stuff.

What IE needs to do is add backwards computability to IE8. The same emulate feature that we have in Windows. Run as IE8 by default, but emulate IE6 with a quick edit
nice thought.
I would use the time to simply reflect & muse on the (work or home life) issues of the day (daydream, even), something which is apparently quite important for any serious progress on any intellectual project.

(See recent HN articles on same, e.g., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=605379 .)
I do, and so do most other reputable businesses.

Loonies don't usually use the whois to show up at your house, they can do so regardless.
Im not convinced such apps are yet used by the kind of corporates we are discussing anyway. The web apps are appeak to much smaller tighter companies - they scare the larger ones.
I kept a voice recorder in my car. I could dictate to myself the rough draft of memos and letters. I would also ponder certain problems, and the vr would let me easily note thoughts or ideas I thought important along the way.

This worked well, but I found that I had to have an objective when I got into the car; that is, I had to plan it like my other work.

I still have a vr in my car, as a matter of fact, but I no longer commute so I use it far less. I can, however, take a phone call, and make notes to myself for follow-up actions.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/936v3/can_you_s...
World's first 256GB USB Flash Drive
Great post. Having worked in large companies, it's difficult to imagine organizations used to massive death march projects adopting this mentality, even if there's a better chance of coming away with viable shipping products.

And in a similar vein, organizations used to large-scale upfront requirements probably aren't even well-positioned to adapt to a new idea that comes out of a failed project. (Think Twitter being born while working on Odeo).

I'd be really interested to hear about examples of large companies that take this approach.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/450906315/sizes/o/
Given the trend in people packing less into smaller luggage, I wonder how feasible it would be to completely dispense with the overhead lockers and the cargo areas and have a bilevel plane, with slightly more room at the seats to stuff your things.
That looks sustainable. I applaud what he's done but also wonder how "owns two jets, two helicopters and a private island" fits with deep concerns about sustainability. Mind you, I'm sure on the balance he's still ahead when it comes to giving back more than he's taken.
wouldn't they go bankrupt eventually? what were they thinking