skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make a good point, however:

1. I have had many people become angry with my stance on documentation for MY projects (written with the above contraints, for fun, for me, if you want to use it: cool not my goal tho). That sort of entitlement ruins it for everyone.

2. It is still done for free, if you don't like the results offer compensation for your choice of improvement. If the work is all volunteer, some stuff that isn't fun won't be done. (debugging is more fun than documenting, since the former is required for something to work right). This is why most non-profits also include someone who is either paid or otherwise rewarded for doing the crap work.
The 7 vices of highly creative people
Has anybody else noticed a pattern towards more profanity on the site then there used to be? I'm not offended, but I don't really think superfluous curse words really add much to a discussion.
I've done 2 builds of this - highly recommended for casual Linux users without a deep understanding of how it works.
I think the reason you're hired is because they think you can perform at the same level of said peers. And you accept the job because you think you can. And want to.

I'd say the average employee age skews towards 35+. No young whipper-snappers here! Except for a few :) Most everyone seems to have a family they need to take care of, which means leaving early some days.

Mailing out DVDs is big business! You have no idea how important Netflix is to people's happiness. I think that's closer to changing the world than most other companies. Just do a search of Netflix on twitter and you'll see what I mean.
So who has the torrent for their software?
Oh No, They Didn’t? Tumblr Launches a “TumbleUpon” Toolbar.
I assume that Cray was talking about a uniprocessor, not SMP. Besides, it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster against EC2's shared-nothing cluster.
Use very short chapters. If a person only needs to spend 10 mins to advance to the next chapter, they are more likely to complete the book.
You might find the way that closures ("upvalues") are implemented in Lua helpful, too. There's a summary in this paper (http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf) starting around pg. 8, and the source (http://www.lua.org/source/5.1/) is pretty readable (if somewhat sparsely commented).
Single Geeky Male, 30 Seeking Same
I'm an old man 30 years old non-programmer with a wife and 3 kids.

I know most of the people YC fund are programmers still in school, and they don't like to take on singles.

My question is how do I find someone who I can work with on my ideas? I have many IRL friends but none of them really understand tech/computers/geek like I do. Where are you my secret geek friend ? :(
How would you write a novel for people who rarely read books cover to cover?

Just like the author of the Twilight series.

http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Saga-Collection-Stephenie-Mey...

That is, if I could hold my nose that long to get through the manuscript.
This is a friend's project. It's a mixture of Twitter/Facebook/Loopt/Google Maps. Looks really interesting, and I'd like to get the feedback of the HN community. Thanks!
Perhaps less well known are open-source reporting companies like Actuate (sponsors/main developers of the top-level Eclipse BIRT project), Pentaho, JasperSoft. Not sure about revenue models for others, but Actuate sells support for their open-source tools and offers proprietary add-ons for those that need to scale their deployments.
1) Your book is available for "Limited Preview" only, not "Full View." Google will let users search within the book, and will show them a limited number of pages. It won't let them read the book from start to finish. (I was able to read 18 pages.) Next to the "preview" it displays links to buy the book from various retailers.

2) Do you think Google hurts websites by letting people search their contents and see excerpts in the search results? How many websites would benefit by using robots.txt to prevent Google from linking to them? Is web publishing as an industry helped or harmed by the availability of web search engines?

3) This page explains the Authors Guild settlement from Google's point of view:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/

Here's a good summary of thoughtful criticism about the settlement:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090204/0248153640.shtml

and a thoughtful take by lawyer and copyright activist (and Creative Commons founder) Lawrence Lessig:
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/10/on_the_google_book_search_agr...

Here's where you can opt out of the settlement class (retaining the right to sue Google on your own, relinquishing any benefits Google has promised in the settlement, and giving you an option to remove your book from the index):
http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/

4) Personally I think the settlement has its flaws, but if I were an author I'd rather have my work searchable at Google than not, including under the current settlement terms.
You clearly didn't bother to read beyond the 'dumb' example.
How to Search FedBizOpps.gov for Web Related Federal Contracts
Unmarked surveillance vehicles in Central London
How do they assign a dollar value to the points for tax purposes? It's my understanding that they would have to in this scenario.
> it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster...

I merely object to the modern redefinition of the word "supercomputer" to mean a warehouse full of cheap PCs.

There once were actual supercomputers.
Well, posting on YC is a good place to start. There are also a lot of events tailored towards geeks, startups, programmers which you can attend and try to make some friends.

Also, Instead of emphasizing on your personal stats ( 30 year old, wife, kids ), why not talk about your vision and ideas, if people find them interesting, they'll probably be more willing to talk to you about them.

Good luck on your search.
OS X: I have lots and lots of email and feeds that come into a combined inbox that I quickly filter into a lot of local folders... and it has always been a pain. Just found this and fell in love with it: http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html

All I use it for is moving mail into folders without the mouse (F3, space, per(personal folder gets auto completed), enter, next!)
Part of Google Voice is automated transcription of voice mails.

It's still not perfect, but like close captioning and OCR of books, it doesn't have to be 100% to be useful for search purposes.
Interesting Product Tour
I've got no opinion on the difference between the "layout" classmethod and the "determine_layout" overridden object method, but his security example is ass-backwards: every other framework with a more "explicit" mechanism for exporting/hiding methods has produced applications riddled with authorization bugs. J2EE is a great example.

You don't make a strong case for the evils of "Rails magic" by pointing out that bad things happen when you leave off the "private" declaration in a class definition.
I'm glad you took my comment at face value.

For more inside information, make sure to follow @frito-lay on the Twitter.

[a 37-year old keyboard monkey peers into his screen, wondering if he followed the marketing company's form correctly]
These Apple App-store stories aren't really "news" anymore.

I think that anyone developing for the app store is fully (painfully?) aware of the fact that the approval process is somewhat of a blackbox, with an element of randomness thrown in for good measure.

Apple appears to want to ensure that the App Store doesn't get overrun with porn, and are clearly deluged with tons of submissions (ref: the story the other day about the wonk that was submitting something like 15 new apps every day).

Although Apple has a rightfully earned reputation as a "it's our way or the highway" type of company to work with, I think most reasonable people would assume that they also do not want to discourage developers from creating quality content for the iPhone/iPod platform.

I would prefer to see a more detailed account of an app submission and reject loop (with feedback, changes, timelines, etc.) than another story about some app getting rejected for what seems like a baseless reason.
How are you supposed to make an informed decision about whether developing for the iphone is worth it unless you have good data on rejections?
Sounds to me like the movie distributors should cut the middle man the way Fox cut out the middle man with Hulu.
I pretty much agree with you. My comment was on the "online personality" part.
I have 12 virtual screens attached to the function keys and run every application full screen in one of these screens. I never need to cycle through anything but just jump directly to whatever I need.
While this is a great anecdote I can't help but think that mayb this wasn't the real reason your friend was let go, it was more like an excuse or a last straw. Obviously I don't know anything about the circumstances but that's what Occam's Razor dictates.
There will always be a gap between what's technologically interesting and what's economically interesting. Web applications stopped being technologically interesting a while back. I've seen everything from in-browser HD-video to AJAX-powered e-mail clients before 2001. After the major technical challenges had been solved the industry kicked in and started mass-producing.

Today the mobile phone platform is sort of like the Web of 1999: a technological wild west. Fart Apps can still make you rich, while useful bluetooth apps hardly exist. If that's not adventurous enough for you, there's plenty more.

I spend most of my time on vehicle robotics for automated roads (C) and divide the rest over Arduino/AVG programming (C) and VMM hacking (C/IA32). You can be sure you won't find any "rich APIs" there. Also there's no chance it will make you rich, you need to be in the proven areas for that. (unless...)
It wasn't really intended as a security example, more another example of unintended things happening if you don't know all the rules.
Mozilla Store Vendor Security Breach
The ads help pay for the service. If they are that intrusive choose something else.
And the predicted language riot has begun.

Edit: I should probably add some content before I get (rightfully) downvoted into oblivion:

The latter example is a pure noop. Instead of computing some values using local variables and returning a hash composed of them as the last expression in the block, it does a dance with tap (extra syntax!) and scopes all the variables to the tapped object (extra syntax) instead of the default lexical scope.

All I can see is that tap adds complexity. At least the first example simplified things (albeit not as well as alternative syntaxes from other languages).
http://hackerne.ws too, though these are all of dubious merit
Actually, there are still strong oxen. Arguably, there are fewer people who need them, but they're out there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_(computer)#Cray_Inc.:_20..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters, and others on 1+ petaflop front are pretty exotic beasts, and run codes that require all 100k+ processors to work in tandem across their speedy interconnects.
I just don't understand this. I hardly ever see the ads and when I do, they don't bother me. Why take such extreme measures? If the ads bother someone that much, why not use a different service or pay for one? Seems to me the cure is worse than the disease.
This is a weird goal. I would guess your best shot would be making each chapter of the book short enough to be read in a short period of time and (more importantly) an independent story capable of standing on its own. How you balance that independence with a flowing story in a novel is a hard question.
The rules in this case seem pretty standard to me; public/private methods work the same in controllers as they do in every other object. Rails is just using an existing mechanism that's been around in OO languages for a very, very long time, rather than implementing something else that does the exact same thing.
It sounds like you are thinking of VP6, not VP8 which On2 also owns. VP8 is apparently better than H.264. There is also reason to believe Google won't stop there. Spending $2 million per day:

http://pulse2.com/2009/04/14/google-spending-about-2-million...

Bandwidth has to be a significant chunk of that, there is a tremendous amount of money to be saved by using more efficient video codecs. They will probably use the On2 team to invent even better codecs and open them up as well.
* maybe because $30 is short money for well-written documentation.*

For sufficiently complex and powerful software and sufficiently well written documentation, it is.
Uhm....ever heard of Adblock Plus?
I prefer feeling faster than being faster (when they're mutually exclusive, which of course isn't always the case).
It's funny to see Haskell and TDD mentioned without QuickCheck http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_QuickChec....

But, yes: referential transparency and functional (rather than sequential) composition make for a different refactoring model, one where eta expansion/contraction is the norm.

He does leave out the opportunity for more fluid refactorings: the lenPreviousLines function could be refactored in a more conventional way (changing the foldr of ((+).length) to a sum---which is a foldl---of a map, for example).
Congratulations.

1. Is there a way to sell your credits back? If not, won't black market deals just be created? e.g. creating an auction for a useless item?

2. If a new user signs up after viewing a listing for MY item, shouldn't I get the credit for the referral? Why not cookie them after they view my listing?
"{(x, random.randrange(100)) for x in ["x", "y", "z"]}"

FWIW, it's possible to do it as a one liner in Ruby 1.9 without tap:

Hash[[:x, :y, :z].map { |l| [l, rand(100)]}]

There may be other ways to do it (like inject, as mentioned in the post). That said, tap is probably more confusing and not necessarily shorter than:

result = {}
[:x, :y, :z].map { |l| result[l] = rand(100)}
result
Disco Project: Erlang and Python Mapreduce
Ask HN: Which companies or startups in SF give tours of their offices?
I'm heading up to San Francisco from Los Angeles this weekend. It will be my first time there. I would like to take a tour of any software company or startup that would allow that, but I don't know of any that would (unless I know someone that works there).

Anything that has to do with programming/computers/startups/etc would be interesting to me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I should do while in SF?

Thanks.
When Security Gets In The Way
Postling: Etsy Founders Do Social Media for Small Business - ReadWriteEnterprise
It's still a clever hack. Some hacks are beautiful, even if not "profitable".
On a related topic: what do people think about ad blocking technology from an ethical viewpoint?

For me, I think I use the same screwy morality that I use when I'm downloading music...I don't mind stealing from wildly successful artists/businesses, but I'll gladly pay full price for a CD or click on an ad for someone who's just trying to pay the bills.
this nonsense shouldn't be covered here
(chromium) Issue 18385: Head in place of close button
Cray didn't make uniprocessors. The reason his supercomputers were faster (and why Cray Computer Corporation is still a darn good supercomputer company) were advances in moving data among lots of processors.
That's not the case at all. I was asking how you do this with dict comprehensions:

http://pastie.org/573042

I'm pretty sure the answer is "you don't", unless it requires setting a variable explicitly and returning it (same as in Ruby).

Since your last comment didn't address that at all, I literally meant you didn't read the whole post, not that I had some secret magic up my sleeve.
i agree, i don't find the sidebar ads to be obtrusive. i don't even notice them. i do notice the ad above the email contents on occasion and they've been pretty useful to me.
Does anyone know of an emacs counterpart to this? (I am an emacs guy.) Thank you.
Yep, and that's what most of the comments on the blog are saying, and I am coming around to agree with them. To put this in context, I am discussing new Ruby 1.9 language features in Ruby 1.9, and how tap can be used to do away with a 3rd party Rails feature (returning).

Whether returning is useful in the first case is a whole other can of worms, and while I still sort of like the aesthetics of it, the technical points people are making in the comments are totally sound, and I might avoid it for that reason.
I agree with the layout example and would add that prototype based languages that unify method calls with attribute lookups (through message sends) give you both:

SomeController := Controller clone do(
layout := "template"
)

SomeController := Controller clone do(
layout := method(
if(params at("foo") == "bar", "foo-template", "template")
)
)

This way the framework would send the layout message to the cloned SomeController object and get the proper layout name for either case.
Agreed. If you've got time to sit and plough through page after page of this drivel, there's plenty of voluntary work out there...
Well instead of styling all labels in the css, you could create a css class for the overlay effect and then add that class to the labels (all or just some etc.) on the form with jquery. That way it's unobtrusive javascript and works when javascript is disabled without mucking up your form.
I bought Ninjawords after reading the description and I just wanted to say that shit is fucking awesome!

Those pussies at Apple don't realize how badly they've screwed this up. Those cocksuckers need pull their motherfucking heads out of their motherfucking asses, unbunch the panties in their snatch, and start treating their users and developers with the respect they deserve.

Fucking shit pisses me off.
You can enter a password to reset it. But you can always just start Windows in safe mode and uninstall the app!

For real security Truecrypt your hard drive and store the key file on the USB key - in this case, do NOT lose the usb key!
Drink, smoke, gamble, eat oysters, dress well, have sex, use your credit card.

I am so glad you posted this!

I already enjoy 3 of these (drink, sex, credit card) and I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work. Starting immediately I'm adding the other 4 and I'm not going to feel guilty about any of them.

A friend of mine offered me a real Cuban cigar yesterday and I politely refused. I'm calling him back tonight. I'm also going to the mall and buying something I never would have worn before. Then I'm hitting the casino and I don't care if I win or lose. I'll skip the oysters, but Saturday night, I'm picking the most decadent thing on the menu. And yes, there will be beer (maybe even spirits) and sex.

If Hemingway, Einstein, Churchill, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde indulged to feed their creativity, then maybe I should do it more often, too. I'll let you all know how it goes. A couple of days later.
Founder pie calculator: how to bring meaningful structure into discussions about dividing the equity among contributors.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%2...
StumpWM + Conkeror + Screen

EDIT: StumpWM video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKt_rVO960Q
vice correlation != creativity causation ;)
The whole point of the modifications was to allow pirated games to run on the consoles. You can't expect companies to be fine with that.
Sparxoo » Interview with Becki Heller from Trendsta Part 1
Vendor Gives Away Free CRM and Help Desk Software
Or even better, FreeOTFE (it's compatible with LUKS).
To me the hack is not about wanting to hide the ads, it's about revealing the details of Google's decision and algorithm to hide ads on "tragic" emails. (I especially love the fact that you need one tragic word for every 167 non-tragic words.)
So, if online movie purveyors actually followed this advice, would this kill the long tail of movies that are only profitable on consignment?
Doesn't matter, the nice thing about software patents is that somebody somewhere could have a patent on using the number '2' in a video codec. And you never know until they get bought out by your enemy.
New Pipejump sales app is Basecamp meets Salesforce
The point as I see it is to get developers moving away from the platform, and buying other phones because there is no app-store-draconianism and saying that when they get the phone. Voting with dollars and making it painfully clear why the decision was made is hugely important.

history has learned us that the most open system will prevail

Really? So Linux on the desktop is destroying Mac OS X and Windows? Honestly, I know of 2 developers (yes, developers) that actually seriously are Linux full-time. The rest are on OS X, because it's a better system as a whole. They don't care about the openness of the underlying platform as long as it isn't managed like a POW camp.

The truth is that the iPhone would be a dream to develop for were it not for the draconian app store processes. I love Cocoa, and UIKit (aka Cocoa Touch) is equally clean to work with.

Also, there's no real solid indication as yet that Android is going to be worlds better, ditto for the Pre. We're all hopeful, especially given the heavy OSS roots of those platforms, but in the end they could have similar dumb restrictions on the hardware from the carriers and we'd end up equally screwed.
Set Up Your Server Right, Part 1
Handgun manufacturers don't build guns solely to murder, that's a ridiculous claim, and I doubt if you even believe it. I don't know of any car that can't exceed most speed limits anyway, but the mechanic analogy is slightly better. In fact, I don't think console modification should be a crime, but I think the console companies should be able to initiate a civil case.
If the ads are presented in a nice way (no animated flash popups with sound (or any subset)), are for something good and not delivered through a data-mining ad network, I don't mind. Those will often get through my ad blocking filters all by themselves.
You could substitute basically any group for "highly creative people" and the article would still be the same. Like if you substituted "power twitter users" this would be ready for Mashable. You could also write an equally namedrop-filled article from the opposite perspective touting the benefits of abstinence. Clearly the creativebait worked though. Sigh.
You're wrong. It gets even more entertaining here:

http://robinwauters.posterous.com/the-sam-sethi-nutcase
Gee, I don't know, for target practice, hunting, or simply collecting. I'm sure those three reasons make up the vast majority of legal firearm sales.
Of course, but the point is that if there is a submarine patent--On2 doesn't have it, someone else does, because On2 already disclaimed all of their rights.

And yes, video formats and encoders are notorious for incredibly trivial and retarded patents.

For example, Predicted_MV = Median(Left_MV,Top_MV,TopRight_MV) is patented.
HP's Huge Salary Cuts Forcing Out Old EDS Employees
I was betting myself that someone would respond like this. See, I'm ahead already.
Even when what the fame is infamy for chewing out and bitching at communities?
Even if that statistic does exist, I'm sure the relationship isn't causal.
Thanks I hadn't seen that, although OTFE can't (yet) encrypt the system drive.
To StumbleUpon, Certain Sites Can Never Be Adult
Say no to drug companies?