skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, should have been clearer--I do think the dev teams at Apple for the same product tend to be smaller than the equivalent team in Microsoft (just, specifically, I know that some of the teams you mentioned have grown). The small teams at Apple probably enforce all sorts of interesting functions such as not chasing half-baked features and leveraging more platform/shared code rather than Microsoft's often NIH approach to things.

Apple lets go of a number of things that Microsoft chases such as a religious concern for backwards compatibility, globalized features (not just localization but geo-specific features), and deep product extensibility with corresponding dev support. No judgment on those decisions but I'd argue that the size of MS teams isn't directly reflected in the product or features most folks consider as users of Microsoft's products and I wouldn't criticize MS based on those team sizes (as the author of this article does). Instead, I'd criticize the PMs or other managers inability to bring focus to those teams to clearly tackle the right problems at the right level of investment at the right time. It takes a lot of discipline to say "no."
Building a "useful Perl 6"
The iPhone app is very, very well done. I still can't believe it was only $10. (For audio of every single game. And a couple weeks ago they added one or two video streams per day.)
COBRA lasts at least a year and a half, and costs EXACTLY as much as your insurance cost when you were working.

COBRA is not spectacularly expensive, it's simply how much insurance costs, whether your company pays for it, or you do. If your company did not pay for health insurance, your salary would be higher.

If you have no money, that's bad, but saying you "have no insurance" because you can't afford it is silly. Talk about affordability if you like, but don't make nonsense posts about not having insurance.
Symptoms of Early Miscarriages
Just a heads-up to anybody who's using this and is running PeerGuardian: they don't play nice together: the initial connection to a workspace is extremely slow and works maybe 1/5 of the time.

And also, don't be stupid like me and figure that ending the PeerGuardian process stops it from filtering your connection. :-)

Anybody have experience with this? Does PeerGuardian just not like RTMP? Or is it something about certain AWS IPs?
The comments on the linked page say it, but it bears repeating: why blatantly rip off the features of your competition that are bad?
It's accurate that what we have is not insurance. Real health insurance would look more like life insurance, with fixed premiums that can't increase if your health degrades over time.

My car insurance doesn't cover an oil change. Nor would any reasonable person expect it to. Normal costs are not something to be insured against. Having customers pay out of pocket for most health care costs would create market pressure to reduce these costs. Does my perfectly healthy baby need a doctor with ten years' schooling to give him a vaccination? No. On the other side of the coin, if I'm paying for it, wait times would decrease. Maybe I'm willing to pay a little bit of a premium if an appointment means being seen when my appointment is scheduled for rather than a half hour later.

What prevents this happening is perverse incentives from federal (and state) income tax policy. Employer provided health "insurance" can be paid for with before-tax dollars.

Amazing fact: those who aren't young and healthy consume a disproportionate amount of health care. The only way to bring down the cost of health care is to make people more frugal, and no one is ever frugal with someone else's money.
For the record I have family high deductible coverage and had no trouble getting it.

What was the reason you were denied? Everyone was denied? Did you try any other companies?

Perhaps state laws make a difference.
I'm pretty sure the header should read "Crippled" instead of "Cippled."

Hilarious typo aside, bravo.
Fun stuff. I've got a similar proof-of-concept project for Ruby, called "CappRuby" which targets the Objective-J runtime (not unlike how MacRuby targets the Objective-C runtime):

http://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby

(disclaimer: it's horribly incomplete and I haven't touched it in months)
How To Clean A Glass Coffee Table
Sony Ericsson C903
This unlocked Sony Ericsson C903 Quad-Band cell phone also offers 3G support as a way to get multimedia very quickly. This slim slider phone features a high-quality 5 Megapixel Camera for capturing big pictures rich in detail and true to their natural colors.
"you can manage to complete"

Implicit in the notion of completing a project is the certainty that the project manager will change their mind, usually after you have written 95% of it. If you copied & pasted those hundred thousand lines, you will have to change something in at least 100 different places. At that point, you'll give up in despair, proclaim the change impossible, and have the PM cancel the project in a fit of frustration. Thus, not complete.

LOC actually sorta makes sense in this context.
This part confused me, "Directors also received what Apple describes as a "commemorative gift" for their service, said to be worth $7,580, plus a payment to cover the tax liability for accepting the gift, which in Schmidt's case was $14,631."

How can you have a tax liability that is 200% of an items value?
Java Tips: Initializing Collection
So you are saying you don't have insurance because you canceled your coverage when you quit?

If you want the government to pay for your coverage say so, but don't say you have no insurance when you chose to cancel it.

Edit: Perhaps I was misunderstood. I don't mean that quiting caused you to loose insurance (and therefor don't quit). I mean quit if you want, and keep your insurance. You chose not to keep your insurance after you quit. This was your choice.
Did you evaluate PyPy? I think they already have a significant RPython->Javascript backend.
True, I wouldn't say he "subscribes" do their DMs. But, he has decidedly opted-in to them sending him DMs.
Opera has a somewhat similar deal (for all their browsers)
yeah, everything I know about CS Grad School says that classes are a necessary formality. For the most part, TAing is too. Grad students live to do research
repost from 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741438
No, the focus would shift to "I am making this site because I love it" sites again. Less void but more genuinely interesting and good content. Well, this is dreaming of course.
Link? I don't see it at http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/docindex.html#pypy-d... (a js interpreter, but no translator).

If I were to guess, not having seen PyPy's: I'd like something about 100x smaller than PyPy seems to be, and I don't want a mandatory up-front translation "build" step.
Pattern Sound Test [video]
Phew for a second I thought it's in europe! But it seems the recession in the US is far from over - 14% decline in house prices and more defaults surely means more trouble ahead for both banks and their insurers
Simulations suffer from the same flaw as any kind of automated testing: you can't verify the correctness of the test, except possibly with another test, which then presents the same problem. At some point, an intuitive leap must be made to call the overall process correct.

This is true of any kind of engineering, but generally the assumptions can be reduced to obvious ones with a reasonable amount of overhead. The complexity and transience of software development makes it the exception.

I have little first hand experience building ultra-critical software, but my impression is that it takes ridiculous amounts of beurocracy to bring the failure rate down to tolerable levels, making the cost astronomical and prohibiting development on the scale of commodity software.
Thank god, as that's easily the worst thing Stephenson's ever written -- like a rambling inept Slashdot comment, but stretched to 160 pages -- it's even structured around an extended simile between user interfaces and fictional automobiles, for fuck's sake!

On top of all that, it has the misfortune of being written at the worst possible point in time:

* too long after mainframes, minicomputers, or basic micros
* right before the death of BeOS (which he was infatuated with)
* right as Apple is about to die from its own bullshit
* long after NeXT has faded from relevancy but before the buyout
* In Linux's middle-aged (~2.2) years when a lot of things were bogged down
in wank -- well after the initial excitement, but well before BK and git
It's hard to call the office ribbon UI 100% bad. I've used it to some extent and it's actually grown on me. It's certainly weird and different, but they clearly put a lot of thought into it. In particular, the allocation of tasks to the different tabs is usually very good, and the automatic switching between them usually happens at the right time. I very frequently find myself looking for a toolbar button and immediately finding it because it showed up automatically.

What really gets me is, now that everybody has a wide-screen monitor, why do we continue to put administrative debris at the top and bottom of the screen? Most of what we care about (web sites, word processing, email) is tall and narrow anyway, so there's a lot of unused space on the sides.
How to design a flat organization
Neat.

ObjJ and Capp were my inspiration for doing a browser language without an offline convert process, so... thanks :)

I was wondering if I could use Cappuccino as the "Skulpt GUI toolkit" too, but that might start to get a bit silly with number of layers involved.
> costs EXACTLY as much as your insurance cost when you were working.

There is usually an additional "administrative" fee added to the premiums as well.
Not enough people in the business world are using widescreen monitors or even "decent" resolutions. Executives and business types actually choose to use 1024x768 or sometimes smaller just so the text is bigger and easier to read. Shell has over 100,000 users worldwide on its intranet and have only just recently upgraded from IE6.

Most corporations have strict operating guidelines.
"Phase 5: "By letting a constraint solver figure out the mundane details, I can write programs by describing what I want, rather than how to give it to me""

This is one of the best arguments for why anyone should bother to learn Haskell (or likewise language)
Censorship versus thuggery
What is it that we must absolutely fear when it comes to our Web 2.0 lives? A summary of the apple news and attacks today.
Apparently they removed it:

http://www.mail-archive.com/pypy-dev@codespeak.net/msg03946....

That post also mentions Pyjamas, a port of Google Web Toolkit which compiles Python instead of Java: http://pyjs.org/
I couldn't disagree more -- what could be more pro-family than being able to come in to the office for face time 10~3, and get shit done on your own schedule?

What could be more pro-family than not having to count vacation days, being able to spend time with your kids instead of reading HN and 'looking busy' when you don't have a pile of work?
So you are saying you don't have insurance because you canceled your coverage when you quit?

You say that as if you see nothing whatsoever wrong with bundling health coverage with employment - and not just employment, it has to be employment at a standard 9-to-5 company that's large enough to actually offer coverage. And God forbid you're not in the higher echelons of the economy and you have to work an hourly grind; look forward to a year's wait at the job before you can get covered.

To me this is just ridiculous; IMO, you absolutely should be able to quit your job for whatever the hell reason you want without ending up uninsured.

I don't care if the government pays or not, frankly - I just want to see a reasonable individual market open up, where the mere fact that you're in the market does not automatically mark you as high risk. If this means forcing all of America to join a risk pool, then so be it, even if I'm healthy and young I'm happy to pay the extra taxes for the increased mobility it affords you career-wise.
What version of the language is this and what subset of stuff works, it seems like everything I try gives me some kind of error, maybe I'm just picking the wrong things.

like it lets me create a dictionary but if I try to call the iterkeys() method it doesn't like that, and the built-in function dir() doesn't work. It has range() but not xrange()?

Cool none the less.
I have seen Fortran programs that don't have any subroutine at all //senior guru model. Even if you could reason about that large amount (40K LOC) I don't enjoy when you die and I get the responsibility to fix "the bug".

I do agree that you should not (depending on language) write sub of everything.
ex int add(int a, int b) {return a+b;} //Junior model
It's worth considering that both approaches may be one-way streets. It's easy to underestimate the effort required to put a good GUI onto a command-line program of any complexity. Often the UI is an order of magnitude more complex than the "program" part of the program.

Last spring, I wrote a clone of the old video game Master of Orion in javascript. Step one was to get the simulation working, and it took a couple days to effectively model the universe, planetary growth models, ship movement and combat, and basically everything needed for a playable game. At that point, all that was left was to "slap a GUI onto it" so that you could interact with that simulation.

That GUI Slapping took at least 20 times the effort of the game engine itself. UIs are complicated. They have little details and corner cases. They need to correct for human behavior, and more importantly, they need to feel right. That's a ton of work, and it seems to get overlooked every time I hear this unix vs windows culture debate.

So yeah, it's damn near impossible to tack a good command line onto a complicated windows app. It's also damn near impossible to tack a good UI onto a complicated command line app.

(I'll leave it to others to insert the comment about 15 years of "linux on the desktop" being evidence of the above.)
A friend of mine was in hospital for a quite serious motorcycle accident (as in "lost half a leg" type serious), and was in a ward with 3 other motorcycle accident patients. The four of them had a lot of fun, whenever any visitors started questioning their intentions about continuing to ride, by pointing out the the _next_ ward had four guys all of whom had fallen off ladders.

Yeah, motorcycling is dangerous - you're around 10 times more likely to be hospitalised or killed per kilometer travelled according to local (Australian) stats - but _life_ is dangerous, and not having fun isn't living...
Awesome - reminiscent of HotRuby, except cooler/faster/parses and executes all by itself. It would be nice if there was a JS Parrot VM.
It's not "Cyxymu", it's Sukhumi. Someone at CNET couldn't be bothered to notice that the article is in Cyrillic.
I looked around a bit and found out that the course from '07 includes video lectures. :)

http://6004.csail.mit.edu/Spring07/
In Opera 10 b2, the python shell never seems to grab focus correctly, so pressing space will scroll down the page way past it, making it very fiddly to use!

Along with hn user pmorici I'd like to find out what subset of Python this supports.
Me too. And absolutely it counts; VB programmers are still programmers aren't they?
The version is the "still lame" version where I haven't implemented those functions yet. :)

Parser-wise it's 2.6.2, but those functions you mention are in C code in real-Python, so I need to (re-)write them in JS. You can see the list of supported global functions and method functions if you grab the source off bitbucket.

(Incidentally, "for x in a_dict" will work the same as iterkeys currently)
You really ought to look at the SICP videos (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...). Hour for hour, it's probably the best introduction to Computer Science you'll ever see, and as as side benefit, you'll learn LISP in the first two hours.

I don't think you're a bad programmer-- but if you're making a distinction between "building things people use" and "writing elegant code", prepare to have your mind blown by SICP.
Looks like they ripped off Office 2007. Some people hate the ribbons, which I can understand, but I actually enjoy them. They kind of categorize different functions, so once you learn where something is, you can use that knowledge when you're looking for something LIKE it.
I use Google as a search engine, that's it. I really don't like all-in-one solutions (except Emacs but I can put that on a USB stick) and am actually surprised how much the person in the article trusts to Google.
> This is because a textual interface is easier to program against than, say, a GUI interface, which ...

I suppose a GUI Interface is expected on an OS built on NT Technology.
Ask HN: Recommend a domain-name registrar..
I want to start my own website, but I'm not sure what domain-name registrar to buy it from. This place seems like a good place to ask, any suggestions?
Hrm, sorry about Opera. I tested in a few browsers, but I confess my browser-dom-fu is weak.

From the look of it I'm telling MooTools to stop that event, but backspace doesn't seem to stop in Opera either. Maybe they don't want people disabling keyboard navigation maliciously?

edit: re: subset, my intention is for source-level 2.6 compatibility with the core language, but that's definitely far away.
wow, that's super cool. i hope you keep working on it and making it more complete.
I use namecheap.com. Never had any issues with them.
Is Google Voice a Threat to AT&T (Pogue's take on the fiasco)?
But it's not bundled with a 9-5. I had health insurance for the 15 months I was working on my own startup. I paid for it myself, out of savings.

If you don't have a pre-existing chronic condition, you can usually get health insurance for a fee. That fee will probably be high. But it's just another expense you need to budget for when you plan out the financials of starting a company.
Here's a flaw which I've seen in several otherwise good programmers - forgetting that sometimes the core purpose of code is to be read and maintained by other human beings. Some of those other human beings may not have had the time to catch up on the latest/greatest language feature or 'trick' and may miss subtleties of your implementation.

I get worried when I see someone take a mainstream language (C#, Java, Python) and try and twist its idioms into whatever their favorite language is (lisp, the ML family, Perl, etc). Or if someone wants to be on the bleeding edge and use the latest language syntax/library trick. This is a pain because

- Someone new to the codebase may not have as much familiarity with all these nuances of the language. For example, I've seen crazy things done with C++ templates. I don't think there was ever a justifiable reason for doing any of them.

- The esoteric, cutting edge features often have bugs and/or don't have great tool support. Fact of life is that the more some feature gets used, the more the bugs found and fixed. If you're on the bleeding edge, you're going to hit weird language/runtime bugs which you need not have inflicted on everyone.

- Debugging. Often, the only thing you have after a weird bug is a crash dump and caffeine. You want to give yourself all the chances you can of tracking down that issue. Esoteric language features rarely lead themselves to great crash dump debugging. I'm not suggesting writing C code but the closer the mapping from code you write to x86/64 code, the easier it is for you
My point exactly! It is plain ludicrous to think that the imperialistic ambitions-driven Russian government would flood Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook just to silence that one guy. I mean, in the end, these are the same media that Russian bloggers use to state their anti-Georgian opinions.
It was either a lets-see-what-will-happen DDoS or this guy indeed orchestrated it to gain some popularity.
For small little projects, I've used Dreamhost with some success and also done hosting there (cheap, easy, not super performant.)

I've also used 1and1 for things that need more configuration, etc. It's reasonably cheap and they don't keep trying to upsell you all the time like GoDaddy does.
Hate to get spammy by commenting too much, but now that I've been using this for two days, words fail to convey how brilliant I think it really is. It's beautiful. It's art. It's a type of thing people rarely experience. I love it. Thank you for creating it :)

edit: i want timestamps saved to some place every 10 minutes so that i can explore it chronologically.
This post is interesting but hard to take too seriously. First, I don't understand the author's hostility to the idea of graduates taking courses. Grad courses supply general knowledge not acquired in undergrad and in-depth knowledge to prepare the student for research. There are reasons why these courses follow the format they do - certain disciplines are best learned by an approach closer to 'lecture than to 'project (Real analysis? Lambda calculus?). The author claims: "You pick up all that needed stuff by doing real work. When you find a gap in your knowledge, you fix it. The instructor might give you an exercise to help you fix it." But this is not always feasible in abstract disciplines - try to pick up real analysis in this way, and you'll probably end up doing a lot of proofs that look very much like the standard real analysis sequence but seem a lot more frustrating. This isn't to say we need to sit in classrooms for six hours a week, but teaching certain subjects (but not all) via projects is a waste of time.

The call for 2-week sessions instead of semesters seems to be based -- like several other suggestions -- on the peculiar preferences of the author rather than on sound argument.

It's easy to come up with one's own wish list of how graduate school should operate, and the author is rightfully cautious about the implementation. But it seems to me the problems raised aren't fundamental to graduate school. Maybe the classroom lecture is becoming obsolete; it arguably helps demoralize students by removing from them responsibility for their own edification. But this doesn't demand top-down reform of everything but the thesis.

We should save that for the undergrad programs.
That's a bit harsh, that's a distribution problem, not a development problem. It's been long time since I've used free hosting, is there provider that doesn't limit bandwidth? (This is just out of curiosity.)
Doing the source-to-source translation on top of the javascript on the client side is quite neat.

I'd actually love to create a "GWT like" that would compile my python (in javascript/html/css) for the different browsers out there. That would be awesome.

GWT is nice and all, but python >> Java...
This is largely why I switched my email to a paid provider that I trust plus local backups; it's simply too important.

Which is not to say that Google doesn't offer excellent services or that people shouldn't use them, but I think many people put far too much trust in a single provider without planning for things going wrong. Stories like this make me slightly apprehensive about all the buzz surrounding Google Wave.
He doesn't. What he really cares about is memory consumption, especially stack consumption. Order of execution can influence that a lot: unevaluated chunks may hold quite a lot memory, and their evaluation in normal order may overflow the stack (in most implementations).

These problems are called "lazyness leaks". This is why he still cares about order of evaluation.
I started using internet.bs recently. Very happy so far. Also, look at this related thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=708640
The speed at which these guys are moving is amazing. Probably because they use Boo?

Nice work :)
I love yosefk!