skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's right, it's all Python and wxPython so porting it should be trivial. A Mac version will come, I hope that someone more Mac-savvy than myself will help me with making it.
Excellent article.

Interesting how these things progress by getting complex, then a simplifying design is found that makes the architecture simpler, or at least with fewer "moving parts".
I have some friends whose kids are approaching the computer-capable age. I've been keeping my eyes open for environments that might intrigue and inspire them. I'm adding yours to the list.

I like the idea of it being Python, so that perhaps they might smoothly transition from fun to "real" problem solving (which is, I find, the most fun of all).
KAL's cartoon - on Google and Microsoft
Completists may wish to also hunt down Mrs. Parkinson's Law and In-Laws and Outlaws. I also advise keeping a second copy of Parkinson's Law, to loan out ;-)
This isn't far from the truth with one of the companies I was involved in!! The non-techs had these totally unrealistic projections for millions of users and the tech wanted to write in their own PHP framework instead of Drupal so that it could scale.

Haha
If you have any taste for high fantasy, you should read it. In my opinion, AFfC suffers a bit under the lack of the storylines of Tyrion and Daenerys. But on the other hand, the Cersei storyline is brilliant. I'm still scratching my head as to how Martin is able to imagine his characters.
I have particular trouble with that last one. I'm not sure why.
1980-89 is pretty weak on their reading list, which would provide some insight to your question of how to overthrow a police state without external forces. Reading Timothy Garton Ash's work on Poland (The Polish Revolution is a good starting point) gives a lot of perspective into how a conservative Catholic majority can be the impetus for revolutionary change, and with greater earnestness than the dissident intelligensia at many times.

For theory, Havel's work is a bit out there but definitely interesting. Try "Power of the Powerless" and "On Evasive Thinking" (it's in his Open Letters, I think); these are two of his best political theory essays. Havel's a bit of a contested figure, but I think it's fair to say that he roughly lives by the principles he expounded in his theoretical works, and that his emphasis on public dissent as a means of taking down authoritarian regimes heavily influenced other East Bloc dissidents.
"If the logic of a program was described once, why does it need to be re-done when the next fancy language comes out? Why can't all languages/systems be backwards compatible?"

The way out of it is via a state machine.

The task of capturing logic in a state machine that is independent of user interface considerations is a very difficult problem.

People will say "Oh use REST" or CORBA or any number of other things, but actually they're all poor, they don't achieve the claimed independence even nearly if the path tree gets complicated.

This is a very important problem to solve for the future of computing. I keep coming back to it - most recently watching Iron Man. I thought "Imagine there was a world where one man could construct so much software" - you'd need some sort of logic state machine like this to do it in.

Hypercard is the closest I've seen to a solution (it's headed in the right direction), but it's tied to user interface. The system needs to allow developers to declare "text box" or "read only text" or "single select" or "multiple select" to allow different interfaces to wrap themselves to it. And the different interfaces could be web, rich, console, unit test, or even a braile system.
Google Voice finds a rival in 3jam
Will Google Wave be ready for prime time in two months?
Then it's even cheaper. They charge us per pay period. It's a few bucks per person per check.
The Art of Failure (2000)
CSIRAC: The very first computer to play digital music
Bad timing for Apple as Google Voice rejection gets FCC involved
Here in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area, and with a lot of agricultural activity further upwind, I find that my car windows develop a film that rain does not remove. Some of the film may be from vegetation (tree sap, etc.), but I can wash the windows and then park in an open parking lot and a driveway with no canapy, and still experience the film.

I wonder whether there are similar issues for solar panels, not solved by rain.

EDIT: Should have read the linked post, first. Rain works well enough for them.
Anways, watch me get down voted to hell because this isn't what others want to hear about our 'precious lifestyle'

Watch you get downvoted for being unhelpful, unsympathetic and trollish.

Maybe that’s where my appreciation of what a physically intensive job means, stems from?

Why are you talking on and on about physically intensive jobs when the OP is not saying "It's too much effort", he's saying "it's wrecking my wrists and it should not, what am I doing wrong?".

Yea no shit nobody on here digs fence posts... they wouldn't be bloody winging about sitting in a chair all day if they did ahahah

They would if their family survival depends on income from sitting typing and they can't type because of knackered wrists.

But I fail to understand ...

That's a failure in your understanding.
Parallelism as smooth as Cilk, Intel
iPhone App to measure Sex performance,  Can You Believe it?
where can I read about this architecture / overengineering?
Advanced vim tips and tricks
Overseas property
International and Overseas property for sale. For Expert advice on buying overseas property investments and
International property developments contact the overseas properties experts International Hot Property
Had wrist trouble in past. The parent post has good advice.

From personal experience:

1. Switching from laptop to desktop made a lot of difference. I now use a MS ergonomic keyboard.

2. Switched to using mouse with left hand. The problem is that the keyboard is too big on the right side due to the additional numberpad. So if you use a right handed mouse, you often end up holding it at a weird angle.

3. Started using vim.

4. Ensure that keyboard and mouse are at a proper height. If you have to bend your elbows, then something might be wrong.

5. Regularly check to see if you are gripping the mouse too tightly or if you are hitting the keys too hard. You may be unaware of the stress you are putting in the muscle.
I was wondering what the lisp version (if any) of become: would be. Thanks for saying it.
My bad I'm retarded.
Yeah, Feast is really good, it only suffers from the fact that it feels like you're only getting half the story. There are a few points where they allude to events I assume will be in Dragons, but you don't get to read them in Feast.

Summary: It's good, but it feels like half a story...
Any Good Sites to Supplement HN?
Besides Reddit (questionable these days), what are some other sites that are similar to Hacker News?
> By Rob Enderle

Need I say more?
Fresh.li - Create your own portfolio on the fly
What else is on your list so far?
If you come across someone with major arterial bleeding and apparent internal bleeding then do you attempt to stem the external bleeding or do you just leave them because you can't do anything about the internal bleeding. Personally I'd apply first aid and call an ambulance, others it seems would counsel that I leave you to die as one can't immediately solve the whole problem.

Do your bit for sustainable living short-term and use your vote to progress long term solutions. Use your consumer power to promote good governance by businesses.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707647
Why big companies sometimes lose out to startups (2008)
New Mogul: http://www.newmogul.com
The problem for me is that OSX isn't linux. As a power user, I do some pretty in-depth stuff that requires the proc file system. Not only that but Mac drivers behave differently than linux ones in terms of the Unix philosophy. And Mac doesn't support more hardware than Linux even though it's a commercial operating system.

Example: I have a Hauppage HVR 1600 TV tuner with on board MPEG-TS transcoder. What linux allows me to do using the character device /dev/video0 either through netcat or through SSH stream the device across the network to another computer, effectively creating an MPEG stream of live TV. I can change channels using V4L2 architecture.

Thus when I'm in college my friends can record shows through my computer through the network onto their laptops (obviously the same channel at a time) simply by tapping the stream.

And because Mac doesn't have a great package management system you probably spend more time than you should upgrading libraries you use (depending on your setup obviously, I've never used Rails so I don't know what goes into that but PHP could be a bear).

Personally I like the expose feature of Mac and I was upset that it took either retarded compiz or a half broken hack to get it working on Linux. Then kwin came along, which does all of what finder does and more. And I will give Mac props for inventing that because it's one of the most useful window management techniques (I find taskbars outdated), but when I look at their system I can see that while I get stable polish, I get overall less features, turning it off, then turning it on kills plasma rendering properly).

But in terms of raw features that are really nice and extensible albeit crashy, commercial OSes, Mac included are always behind. (I mean seriously no one has addressed dependencies and dynamic library management like Linux has.)
The regular consumer will notice that friends using Pre/Android/something else have cool apps like Google Voice that aren't available on the iPhone, and might buy a different phone come upgrade time.

Of course, there has to be a different phone that's desirable enough, and from what I've heard, that isn't the case yet.
How Steve Jobs validates the Customer Development model.
Its true, the unemployment much more spread out then in the dot com bust.

This recession doesn't "feel" as bad as 2001 where everyone I knew was getting laid off from a tech company or startup, I think because the spectrum affected is so much wider.
Amazon sued for wrecking teen's Kindle work
Just gave it a try on a Windows Vista box and it crashes on startup. I'm going to give it a try on Windows XP later when I wake up from my "nap" as I haven't slept yet ;)

This is a great and noble initiative and I look forward to checking it out when I'm more than semi-conscious. Please, no wise ass correlations between semi-consciousness and the use of Windows Vista :D

I'm Swayze.
I use pygame every day, so I'm pretty excited about this new update. Great work, pygame team.
Assuming all other agents are rational is normally not rational.

Even in the case where all the agents are rational, if they don't all know that, they should still guess above zero.

Only if it's common knowledge that everyone will be implementing the strictly "rational" strategy is guessing zero correct.
The title of the article is misleading. Amazon has not been sued; A class-action lawsuit has been launched.
Vegetarianism
Thanks for telling me - I don't have a Vista box, but I should definitely solve that. I think I'll install Vista on VMWare and look at that.
I just picked up Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers [http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Birth-Numbers-Jan-Gullberg...]. I think this was posted in a comment on HN. Its a tome of a book, but from what I have seen so far, it looks really interesting.

Definitely not a quick summer read though IMO
Using htaccess Files for Pretty URLS
One point is missed: if we start making the small changes in our personal lives, we are more likely to notice the changes that need to happen in our corporate lives -- we are our corporations, after all.

Further, they hint around it in the article, but the single biggest thing that we can do personally is move away from eating and using animal products. I'm still an omnivore, so I'm certainly not doing my part, but I have started eating meat less than I used to.
Weird... actually (from my limited experience) Java development is more similar to PHP than .Net, so the original comment actually makes sense. It seems like downmodding comments became a lot more common in HN recently. Not a good sign.
I find this kind of article worrying. It clearly claims that the only true way forward is "to abolish the industrial society".

I think that's a very limited view of the situation.

Whenever faced with a big new problem, there are two ways to get past that problem: either you backtrack, regress back to times when the problem didn't exist, or you move forward, and figure out ways to solve the problem without turning your back on progress.

This author effectively advocates turning our backs on progress, giving up the last few hundred years of development. He would have us go back to living in small self-sufficient communes, rather than focusing on growth and progress, to "save the planet". This suggestion is dangerously wrong. It is not "solving the problem", it is running away from it. The way through this problem is forwards, not backwards.

Ultimately, there is only one reason to "save the planet": so that we can enjoy it. There is no point in saving the planet if it means sacrificing ourselves along the way. AS the author rightly points out, killing ourselves to save the planet misses the point. Well, so does regressing back a few hundred years. We are who we are, we are a people/species who want to enjoy our lives, realise our potential, look to the future, move forwards, built greater, better, bigger things. That's basic human nature. The proposed solution goes against this basic human nature, and so it must ultimately fail (but it can probably cause endless misery before finally being thrown in the bin along with communism, theocracy, feodalism, and other Bad Ideas).

It is quite possible that fanatical ecologism will be the great blight of the 21st century, as fanatical nationalism was the great blight of the 20th.
This article raises a few points you already knew if you read The Economist that aren't wrong but aren't unusually insightful either. Other than that, I really don't like that it separates civilians from politicians and corporations. We form and staff our corporations and elect our politicians.

The Us vs. Them mentality doesn't work because there's only us. Those in power don't want to live on a destroyed planet any more than we do, and even if they did, we're the ones who keep voting them and their policies into office. The destruction has occurred almost entirely in democratic countries over the last century.
I'd like to dial this back a bit. But not without saying that knocking down strawmen is not "defending things individually."

And really... you find it "confusing and different" that PHP uses a backslash for delimitation? Seriously? You can simultaneously wrap your mind around recursion, closures, pointer arithmetic and continuations but you're confused by the use of a backslash opposed to a colon, double-colon or triple colon?

Confusing and Different? Seriously? Variety is unambiguously good. This is mutation and evolution. And it results in languages as fantastically different as Haskell, C, F#, Python, Perl, Lisp and even PHP.

Programmers are by and large a smart bunch and the last thing we need to do is dumb-down languages for the least common denominator.
He's not saying don't do anything. To use your metaphor, he's saying: Don't put a bandaid on it and claim you saved the man's life.

Moving towards personal sustainability is OK, but there is no use pretending it is a major fix. It is more of a start, a way to get people thinking about the world they live in. After that the real work must be done, and not just harm reduction, but actively fixing the things we've broke.

In fact the article points out one thing that struck me as particularly insightful: Current environmental thinking suggests we can only live in such a way as to harm our environment. This suggestion is way too convenient, as it reminds us all that we are sinners (environmentally). I think that maybe this sort of thinking is what bothers people about environmental types: it feels like religion, not any sort of fact based solution.
How did this get posted twice? Does the duplicate check not work for articles that have been flagged to death? - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700251

Edit: Cached link to that HN page before it got deleted: http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:TPxg1J2JO8cJ:news.ycomb...
Training Your Focus
GTD based task Management Application
I couldn't disagree more.

While it is informative to know that showering for a short period is not an effective way to conserve water in the grand scheme of things, there is no doubt that it is critital for us to conserve water. The important thing is that the awareness and sense of responsibility is present. That good-will can be transferred from ineffective actions to effective ones, and we'll be able to craft effective - and not extremist - conservation policy.
Ahhh, I gotcha...

Honestly, I hope you can put your pride aside for a moment and think about this.

Under your scheme, if you were to create a namespace foo, you couldn't have a class named foo in any namespace in your application.
At least here in Chile, when somebody calls you 'menso' it is understood that you are being called dumb. But it's connotation isn't too negative, it's rather familiar and cutesy, probably because we got it from El Chavo del ocho :)
This was recently on HN:

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22919/

This other program is great for either children or adults:

http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
Windows users probably wouldn't waste their money on bull like this. Mac users otoh, will probably adore it.
It doesn't, but it does allow you to specify a Gizmo (gizmo5.com) SIP number as your 'phone'.

There are numerous SIP softphones for the iphone/touch, so this means you can essentially do free VoIP.

Why it only works with Gizmo SIP numbers is unclear. Seems like it should work with any SIP number, including one you host on your own servers.
stable, debugged code is really valuable

Moreover, institutional knowledge is valuable. It's not just the code, it's the team of people -- both the users and the maintainers -- who have decades of experience with the codebase.

Change the codebase and you throw that all away. Those of us who use thirty-five-year-old text editors to write software for a forty-year-old OS architecture that's running on a thirty-year-old microprocessor family understand this. ;)
It is critical for us to solve the water problem. It is not critical for us to conserve water. If we can solve the water problem by another way, so much the better.

Indirected good will is a dangerous reservoir of activity that could be directed in directions both good and bad. Throughout history, this sort of thing has led to tyrants and other political disasters.
Needless to say, meditation contains a whole tradition of techniques to teach people to train their focus. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't already tried it-- it's worth encountering, even if you ultimately decide it's not for you.

Coming from a different direction, the meta-cognitive therapists also have some techniques around focus and directed attention.
Yahoo Labs chief sees real-time search opportunity by "mining" Twitter data
Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone
I disagree. Anders Hejlsberg was already an experienced language designer with the highly commercially successful Turbo Pascal and Delphi under his belt before he came to Microsoft and developed C#. James Gosling only had worked on Oak before Java, a language which never made it past the stage of an internal research project at Sun. It's disingenuous to say MS "copied" anyone in this case - they simply went out and found an experienced languages guru and hired him. Just like when they needed someone who knew about operating systems, they hired Dave Cutler from DEC.
Why force people to make a choice? It's in the best interest of the computer user to have a browser installed by default. Since Microsoft makes a browser, it makes sense to use that one with their operating system. End of story.

Yeah, there's history behind this, but really, it was TWELVE YEARS AGO. It's time to move on.

An operating system should come with some basic tools like a command shell, file manager, web browser, text editor, calculator, media player etc. As a user, if I want to upgrade any one of those things, I can do so. But please don't leave them off the system just because there are 3rd party alternatives. And please don't show me a screen full of options for every one of them.

This was a silly issue to squabble over back in the 90's, and it's only gotten sillier since.
Yes, it is fair. The world has changed a lot and nowadays if you have a patent worthwile funds will flood your bank account to bring it to reality in no time.

The rest is bureaucracy or just plain bad intention.
Future of the Threading and Garbage Collection in Ruby
This is a big win, IMO. As much as I despise Microsoft's monopoly over the desktop OS market (and to a lesser extent, the browser market), the decision to ship Win7 without a browser was douchebaggery on a whole new level. A browser is now an integral part of every OS, just like a file manager or an image viewer. Removing it does more harm than good, and only serves to confuse the average user.
The answer is obvious but the point here is that the average solar panel installer doesn't keep a mountain load o data about the energy output and efficiency of their panels and then make business decisions about it.
The JVM is GPLed.
similar in mechanism (voting, list of links) or similar in content?

content: programming languages blog:
lambda the ultimate: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

mechanism: image bookmarking
ffffound: http://ffffound.com [NSFW sometimes]
They seem to have removed most of the reasons I didn't like it: PyObjC dependency, crappy OS X support, and py2app weirdness. I still prefer the design of pyglet (http://www.pyglet.org/), but this looks like a good release.
FYI:

"3jam beta costs $4.99 with a 12-month subscription, but price is indirectly proportional to commitment. A three-month bundle costs $5.99, and you'll pay $8.99 for one month. The charge won't include texting rates, which 3jam will tack on for $5 to $20 per month."
I had long assumed that most people realized that short showers, recycling plastic, driving small cars, turning off lights, and all these other little things don't actually affect the environment at all. We all do them, but only for the sense that we're doing something. Not because they actually do anything.

Over time though, I've met enough people that get worked up enough about these things to realize that many people actually think they are making a difference.

I usually just nod along.
KnownSenderFind Program for Finding Spam False Positives
Ummm, no. In C++, classes are looked up the same as namespaces, you can have a namespace called foo::foo::foo::foo which contains a class called foo!

The only restriction is that you can't have a class or namespace with the exact same fully qualified name. That's a perfectly reasonable restriction. The whole purpose of namespaces is so you can have a class called foo in a different namespace from another class called foo.
I agree. The reason Doug had to wait for a GUI was that microcomputers weren't fast enough to implement them. Although I imagine the Amiga and Mac brought him some money (patent was 1970, assume 17 years to bring 1987), I agree with you that hardware speed and capability is enough to get going in maybe 2 years.
I could agree more, but it would require surgery.

I'm all for a high-quality, environmentally-friendly lifestyle, but the way to do this is forward, through technology and innovation. Not by moving back into teepees.