skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't glue it up if you want to be able to take it apart to move however. Several of Megan's commenters said one of the particular things they liked about IKEA is that they could disassemble and reassemble it easily.
The Leaderboard can be found here:

http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard
As a personal anecdote, the m/f ratio in a company (one of the biggest ISPs in my country) a friend worked was supposed to be 67-33, according to LinkedIn. When I told him that, he said that certainly it wasn't the case. He worked in their HQs, along with as much as 90% of their employees, and one of the first things that made an impression on him was that women were so much more than men. By the way, there are profiles of 183 employees of that company in LinkedIn, with the error margin not sufficient to explain the discrepancy.
I'd be interested to know how you did that.
Great post. NoSQL seems to be a band-aid. And for some problems, the best solution is to rip off the band-aid :)

My thoughts at http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/look-ma-nosql/

SQL has survived because it is reasonably portable, is descriptive and has a rich ecosystem. NoSQL is a response to a problem but it is one that will not get mainstream adoption because it is non-standard.

It is a great stepping stone; what comes out of it is hopefully a standards based scalable data storage and retrieval system.
Look Ma NoSQL
DroidDraw - draw your Android activity, get XML layout.
from what I've read of him I would employ Zed. I dont think he is quite the same in RL (but brings some of the good qualities).

He strikes me as a "get things done" sort of person.
I would guess it's more like "pump white noise to an infinite number of people's ears at the press of a button."
So from this we can deduce that their bed is in the corner?
IMO that online persona is perfect for a technology evangelist. Make noise, rake muck, profit.
'Engineers and Scientists value the truth.'

Do you live in NYC or a similarly large city? I think you'd see that engineers (specifically, in the building & construction trades) can be just as corrupt as the next guy (and we're talking people's safety here, not the kind of corruption that doesn't harm others so much, like fake parking permits).
creative commons? (really I don't know.)
I understand Netflix has one of the most generous severance package policies in the industry.
One thing that I have found that helps with exactly this situation, and I have suffered it as well over the years, is to move your focus from one end of the spectrum to the other. That is, if you have to spend your daylight hours grokking another mans API, then spend a few hours in the evening, or during off-time, hacking on your own embedded project with the Arduino. I've got tons of projects around, all of them slowly making progress admittedly, with the purpose of getting me out of my funk .. I don't actually code my hobby projects for any other reason than to make my professional work (embedded systems for safety critical applications) a little more enjoyable.

It sure is fun to dive into Android, for example, and get some context, and then another week spend some time with the AVR compiler.. then the Beagleboard, etc.
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I absolutely despise 'location aware' software that assumes that because I've crossed the border, I want to speak that language. It happens to me with my iPhone all the time and its bothersome, frankly.
Alcatel OT-E805: The best launch
The Alcatel mobile company has recently launched its latest invention named OT-E805 in the market. The device is available in fabulous colors such as pink, light blue and dark chrome. It utilizes GSM 900/GSM 1800 networks. It is compact in size and measures 97×45×17.3 mm and weighs just 80 grams. The colored display of this phone is about 128×128 pixels. It houses 64 polyphonic ringtones and mp3 ringtones. The phone is capable enough to retain 20 dialed, 20 received and 20 missed calls. It can easily save up to 250 SMS messages.
Long, long before he put up his infamous Rails rant, I spoke with him several times about Mongrel implementation, build issues and getting stuff running on different linux systems.

He seems to me to be a nice guy, a clean coder and yes, a guy who gets things done. Very much in contrast with the generally abrasive character he's built on his website.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I'd have no trouble hiring him.
I remember being able to load images in a browser for the first time. My first thought was "uh oh" .. then my next thought was "wonder if I can use this to go to nntp://alt.binaries.pictures..."

My how far we've come.
I don't think the primary drive or hype behind NoSQL is performance. I think it is that SQL has become some sort of norm for data persistance, when in many cases a SQL database isn't necessary, or even optimal.
I did some FORTRAN 90 programming on a CM2 in the early 90s. FORTRAN 90 had a nice parallel array/matrix op syntax that mapped well to the CM2 but I actually ended up doing most of my work on a IBM RISC workstation because interactive access to small CPU was much more productive than waiting for a batch job to finish on a larger machine.
That's pretty cool...
Bad joke...
No, you're not copying those short phrases from anyone else, you wouldn't need to filter them out. This is establishing a point for yourself where any 5 word phrase from now on can be published by you relying on your own publication as a prior source.
10 Essential Tips To Get a Strong Health
Developers! Developers! Developers!

Even at the peak of Windows' dominance, Microsoft never forgot that applications were the reason everyone bought a Windows PC instead of a Mac (or 'nix on the server side). No matter how great OS X is, the kids wouldn't be buying Macbooks if they weren't sure it could run Word and $100-\epsilon\%$ of web apps would be usable from Safari or Firefox. Today, people still linger on Windows XP because everything still runs on it.

I don't think any truly killer mobile apps have emerged yet, but when they do, Apple and Google will need to start pampering mobile developers more than they have been.
I think what happened here is that a subtle debate about whether the characteristics of relational databases are a good fit for web development* has been hyped into some kind of movement. It doesn't help that a many peoples' first impressions of RDBMSs these days probably involve reading just enough of a MySQL tutorial to use it for a PHP project. Working with relational databases without understanding the relational model (e.g., understanding indexing, the rationale for normalization, good schema design, etc.), can lead to disappointing performance, and in those circumstances, people are unlikely to have someone better-informed convince them otherwise. (The object/relational mismatch is part of it, as well.)

* Among other things, RDBMSs put a lot of resources into ACID transactions -- in the use cases for which they were designed, data is expected to outlive some employees, and just dropping part of an update to e.g. a medical record or insurance claim would be a disaster. Similarly, the databases can do elaborate checks on the data, and any potential changes, to ensure that it's always internally consistent. Losing a youtube comment wouldn't be a big deal, though, and if you're willing to cut corners on transaction guarantees or internal consistency, there are performance benefits. (Being extremely protective of the data is a good default, IMHO.) And, yes, not just relational DMBSs are ACID, but many "NoSQL" dbs have that trade-off in mind.
Putting every single thing in the browser is exactly what Google wants to do with its future (if ever released) Google Chrome OS.

From a business point of view, this way of doing things is probably seen as a good way to prevent software piracy: keep lots of things on the server side...
How about Ubuntu and IEs4linux? Nothing like a few more layers of abstraction.
Loads of video lectures on engineering topics by IIT professors
I can definitely relate. I'm building a monome(.org) clone with an Arduino and having a blast.
Somebody please download all the videos and create a torrent for the same. :-)
It shows how flawed the whole modern intellectual property system (and not just copyright) is when a university believes it has to preemptively register trademarks it might use in the future, say, in the highly unlikely event it changed its name from Harvard to Hahvahd.
I've felt exactly the same way in the last few years.

A complete understanding of the whole system in every detail is not so necessary for me. I just want to focus on the things I'm trying to accomplish without the need to constantly lookup API documentations and writing glue code.

That's why (for my own projects) I always end up making my own tools and coding almost all the stuff I need by myself.

But our culture is going in the opposite direction (http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr...).
By choosing the easy path for yourself you’re choosing the hard path for web developers. Sooner rather than later this tension will become too much and you’ll find that websites simply stop supporting your browser of choice.

But, like someone already mentioned in this thread it’s not a binary choice. Install Firefox (or an equivalent up-to-date browser) for normal browsing and leave IE6 on the machines for legacy apps.
"Lets" not "let's."
nice ! long and varied list of courses and topics ...
Reference: http://www.kable.co.uk/government-internet-browsers-23jul09
This is why having a well-known online presence is important.
There's a major niche in which hierarchial DBs are quite common - filesystems. While there have been attempts to graft relational features onto them ("journaling" overlaps strongly with transactions, symlinks, etc.), apparently most people haven't historically considered the ability to do arbitrary joins over a whole filesystem to be worth the impact it would probably have on performance.

Also: Hierarchial databases are very different from key/value stores. K/Vs are flat (joining, batch consistency checks, etc. are usually done clientside in a faster/safer language than the DB was implemented in, such as PHP), while hierarchial databases are (naturally) hierarchial. If a client searches for data in a directory, it will only see the nodes in that directory, or those found by walking any subdirectories. While this can be very fast (most records won't be in the same directory, so the first operation has already reduced the search space considerably), much data fits poorly in trees, and constantly rearranging subdirectories or adding symlinks is at best a workaround for the massive conceptual mismatch.

OTOH, it's a good fit for some cases - we're communicating on a hierarchial database right now. As moving one comment thread from one post or parent comment to another would be incredibly rare (if it were possible), a lot of DB functionality to allow flexibility in data modeling can be discarded. Modeling the discussion as a tree of nodes (S-exps, in this case) with pointers to parent comments, subthreads, user IDs, etc. is pretty straightforward.
I enjoyed this immensley. I tried to make a kingdom of "x"s.
No they wouldn't. Oxford English and such like take their duty seriously. It's their responsibility as scolars to represent the English language being used at the time of publication.

Sure if you hit em with a stick for a bit they might relent but there would be a struggle.
KIO, of course
file:// with zip://
http:// is so good that it's used by Konqueror; imap:// and pop3:// if you want them.
fish:// for file transfer over SSH (think scp)
smb:/ for windows network browsing.
I think these kinds of stories are interesting because all these tech pundits act like they are the only people who have thought of these shortcomings. I think one of the reasons there hasn't been a product from Apple yet is for precisely the UI issues discussed in the story. If Apple indeed has a product in this space, it's likely to be different from what people have been envisioning. Remember that before the iPhone, people were picturing something much like an iPod. What Apple actually released was something few (if any) people predicted beforehand. Apple will either innovate their way through these issues, define a new product category where many of them are irrelevant, or keep it mothballed (until one of the previous two points is possible).
I guess the devs were just too pure of mind to consider such words. :D
Other Companies Should Have To Read This Internal Netflix Presentation
The tweet http://twitter.com/SelfRefer/status/3128391843
WorldMate + Push = Must Have iPhone App for Road Warriors
There is still plenty of work to be done on impeded systems for sensors and other simple devices. Some of theses systems are powered by a watch battery for years, they might have more or less processing power than an apple II but far less ram which tends to limit code bloat.

EX: A new 8 bit CPU from 2008: The triple clock enables the selection of the most suitable clock frequency from 32.768 kHz, 500 kHz, and 4 MHz according to the processing type, thus minimizing the operating current. These power-management functions help prolong battery life and reduce product size. ... RAM 2 KB (http://www.okisemi.com/en/866/869/000576.html) And yes some people are really working on an 8 bit cpu at less than 40khz due to power limitations.
How quick and accurate is image matching? They can recognise the sleeve quickly but not, it seems the discs. OCR-ing movie titles from discs would be near impossible with any degree of accuracy.

Is there not a unique code/barcode around the central hole on the back though? Or could they overprint a barcode?
Broadband Is This Generation’s Highway System
FileSocial: Not Just Another Twitter File-Sharing App
Embrace the trolls
Where's my Jet Pack? Apple Tablet and Future Interfaces
Agreed (having also written a text todo-list processor). Furthermore, I found that it was too hard to encode state, and the various ways for a task to respond to changes in state, in a reasonable way - far too many exceptions and corner cases.
Wordpress, Joomla, etc. seem to have no problem with this. I've implemented FCKeditor and TinyMCE without issue.

There's content-editable now too, which should make things simple: just mark a section of text as editable, edit in the browser and resubmit the page back to the server (nope not tried it yet).

"any version" - hmm, really? You should be coding to standards compliance first, not to MSIE, perhaps that's the issue??
Twilight's Stephanie Meyer accused of plagiarism
Netflix on the iPhone Will Work - But Only With Offline Mode
The company with the most leaders at all levels wins.

I like this quote, but I wonder if it can be taken too literally. I've never been in an organization with a plethora of leaders, so I don't know first hand, but it seems to me that conflicts can arise if too many people want to lead.
One of my bugbears is agency created emails that are sent direct from the agency servers or include agency links for tracking. My relationship is with your business, keep them out of it (or at least out back where I can't see them).
Backus' speech on the "intellectual bottleneck" is about similar things.
I dunno, Zed, maybe you should just look for a job as a "lone ranger". Whenever I read one of your rants, I'd chuckle and say, "Gee, I'm glad he's not talking about me." I wonder how other programmers would feel working with you, never quite sure when they'd be fodder for one of your rants.
Don't confuse powerful with power-hungry
It's hard to put email and blog posts into human context. What seems abrasive in text only mediums, may not even seem remotely abrasive in real life where we can see body language, facial expressions, etc. Even text as straight forward as "Fuck you! I quit" may just be a joke directed at folks that get it. But outsiders read it and immediately think, "wow, that guy is not nice" when in actuality he's just goofing-off with others that 'get it'. Long story short, I'd have to meet the guy several times and hang out with him in person before I could pass any sort of judgment and I think other smart HR/mgrs would agree. He would not be immediately ruled-out because his online comments seem offensive.
Quite a few of these remind me of myself at work except, "He acts out sexually." Where do I sign up for that one?
I worked on the Slymbolics 1200, as we called it affectionately, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics) in the late 80s. It was absolutely the best experience I've ever had programming. I still own shares in Symbolics. Had I known what was happening with RMS at that time and had been politically conscious enough to understand the issues I might not have used the machine. However as they say, hindsight is 20-20.
It is also a transfer from future taxpayers to wealthy bondholders (including the Chinese government), since 100% of this program is funded with borrowed money.

At $3 billion, the new program size, Cash for Clunkers is four times larger than the U.S. government breast cancer research program. It says something about American priorities.
The current link has a menu with a huge list of drugs links in it, presumably why they didn't link direct. Perhaps the site was hacked or maybe not. I'm using a text based browser, I'm guessing those links are hidden normally.
See if you can get them to agree a list of competitors they don't want you to sell to rather than just a blanket exclusivity. Try to add a regular review clause to allow this list to be reduced over time.
It's not only the net total of the amount of money in the market, but also its movement. If everyone had a million in the bank, but no one was spending, the economy would suffer.
One thing I had forgotten until yesterday... what about college students, people just starting out, or the poor in general?

I don't know about you guys, but in college I went through two of these clunkers, neither lasting more than two years. What happens to the price/availability of them as you take 2M of them off the road?
There's a big difference between people with outlying opinions, who can add valuable feedback to a discussion and trolls, who add nothing.

Experiments have repeatedly shown that when trolls are visible only to themselves, no one else can acknowledge their presence, so they just go away.

Trolls are to be ignored. Outliers are to be embraced.
I know where you're coming from, but I wonder if this observation is just a classic language rant waiting to be born. In other words: I wonder if the problem is not that all higher-level APIs necessarily suck, but that the ones you have suck, and your language platform is too impoverished to profitably work around that.

API design is hard. It's like composing poetry, or trying to design the game of chess. ("I know, the queen should be able to jump like a knight if she's on a white square!") It is bound to take thousands of little trials and errors in order to get things right. And my suspicion is that certain languages and platforms make it especially difficult to tinker with existing APIs, or wrap them while minimizing the leaks, or replace one part of them and leave the others alone, or build them in a way that makes it easy to compose complex higher-order objects and behaviors out of little pieces. When working with those systems, the most efficient way to solve any given problem is to just slog through, trying to make lemonade out of slightly-spoiled lemons by hand-sorting and hand-squeezing each lemon. And that can be effective -- at least it's more efficient than trying to use genetic engineering to construct a lemon out of raw amino acids -- but it's not always fun.

There are high-level APIs that are a joy to use. I love jQuery, for example, which is a layer of Javascript atop more Javascript atop an absolutely scary C program atop Unix or Windows and yet somehow manages to feel lightweight and elegant and composeable. But for every elegant API there are dozens of clunky ones.

The lovely thing about low-level C or assembly is that the building blocks tend to be simple, understandable, and composeable -- and, if they aren't, it's not so much work to rewrite them. (Though, as jgc points out, in modern times even assembly is hardly immune to complexity. The idiosyncrasies of modern processor architectures are so baroque that it takes years for optimizing compilers to be refined to take advantage of them.)
Data management in systems biology I - Overview and bibliography
More details about Microsoft and Yahoo deal
wtf is this doing on HN?
HN has some of this built in it looks like.

Plenty of times I'll see a comment by someone (usually clearly trolling) and the comment is labelled 'dead' seconds after posting.

Here is a timely example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743103

The comment at the bottom clearly is not a troll and yet it is labelled 'dead'.

Outlying opinions are not appreciated on HN though, there was a 'worstcomments' link (admin only now it seems) that would show some (very) clear evidence of that.

Which is a real pity.
For which website?
> Had I known what was happening with RMS at that time and had been politically conscious enough to understand the issues I might not have used the machine.

What do you mean with that ?
I disagree with the middle-way answer: it also doesn't require any thinking.

In any forum, you should separate the emotional content from the factual content and only respond to the latter. This is quite different from taking the middle way.

Though there are moderate trolls whose inflammatory postings contain useful factual content, I prefer forums where extreme trolling is dealt with harshly. Dissent is uncorrelated with rudeness (meaning that moderating extreme trolling won't drown out dissent) and no-one wants to spend their online time with the horribleness of uncontrolled trolling.
The scary thing to me is how few trolls it takes to destroy an otherwise perfectly good community. 10 trolls can ruin the atmosphere for 1000 people easily.
Looks like a nuisance suit.

I just read the pdf of the complaint, and I can't believe that the law firm went through with it. The quoted passages aren't even similar.
Certainly, it is an arbitrary python function, so the resulting foo might be a dictionary or whatever. But this doesn't push it closer to the visitor pattern.

Certainly, you can use decorators as a tool to implement the visitor pattern by implementing some hairy, magical reflecting class-decorator which adds a method visit to an object, which then calls visit_{CLASSNAME} on the parameter, but this is just a way of implementing this and not the visitor pattern in itself.
...asks someone who created his account 7 minutes ago.
Google Acquires Video Compression Technology Company On2 For $106 Million
10 Security Threats to an Organization – Part 2
When looking at the first five security threats that can hit an organization we dealt with the harmful effects of spam, viruses and malware and how monitoring your network and investing in patch management is an effective way of preventing such threats from attacking your network and infecting your machines. Not all threats are external, and not all of them are done maliciously; however, they still have a negative impact on the organization so it’s important to be aware of all the potential dangers that are present both outside, and even inside, an organization.
Much of my blog is devoted to precisely this subject. (See for instance: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=16)

I believe that the only solution to the complexity plague is a from-scratch reboot of all of computing.
CPU built from 74 series TTL chips running web server:
http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
Arc 3.1 (works on latest MzScheme)
The best free open source software for Windows
If you define a troll as someone who contributes nothing, then I guess I can't disagree with you.

Todd's definition was a bit broader, though, and seemed to include those who expressed a negative opinion in a harsh way.

Of course, the word has as at least as many definitions as there are online communities. The post could have easily been "Negative outliers are not trolls!"