skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an often used misquotation. Her is the original passage with context from Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars (1967):

And now, having spoken of the men born of the pilot’s craft, I shall say something about the tool with which they work, the airplane. Have you ever looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane, but about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose
sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage
of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its
nakedness.
Does anybody know what happens to your Android phone when Google suspends your account? I know my G1 required a google login to actually complete the boot process the first time, but after that I've never used any google services other than maps. Would my phone notice if my account were suspended?
http://www.trypython.org/

Requires Silverlight, but is far more complete as it wraps IronPython. I think its quite neat what you can do with silverlight even if its EEEEVIL MS tech.

Another cool SL trick: http://www.mix09.org/labs/gestalt/samples/canvas.2d.drawing/...

Using Python inline in your html via Silverlight and a helper JavaScript called "Gestalt". It also supports Ruby.

http://www.mix09.org/labs/gestalt/
If you had a lot of domains, the Euro/Dollar difference right now might hurt a little bit. They're good, though.
You get the Google apps for free with this, too, which is nice for some kinds of sites. OTOH, it's one more egg in the Google basket.
They're gone now. :-(
"Answer: Lobbying. Insurance companies lobby hard and donate lots of money to political candidates."

Close, but wrong. The employer health care exemption was pushed through mainly by unions, not the insurance industry. It was a benefit negotiated by the unions. It's really not insurance.
What's on an airline baggage tag?
Erm, wut? Not really. If there is a warning, its there for a reason. Fix that.
"The problem in the US is not -- let me repeat -- NOT because healthcare services are too available because people don't have to pay."

No, the problem is that healthcare services are too EXPENSIVE because people don't have to pay directly. Third party payer means that people who clip coupons and shop for a month to buy a TV don't even know how much an MRI costs, and are gladly willing to pay for the most expensive one out there because they are spending other people's money.
Drop it now.

Copy photoshop toolbars on the sides.

Monitors have more width than height.
Students get pretty hefty discounts from Apple (hundreds off). All you need is to prove that you're a current student.

Apple refurbs are also great, just got a new(er) mac book pro for 1350 (650 off).
Browsers don't need to block all advertisements, just the annoying ones. Users will just ignore the rest.

How much money do you think consumers spend as a result of internet advertising? The amount of money that can be sustainably made in the industry is significantly less than that.

The ad industry markets to clients, not consumers. On the internet, unlike every major medium before it, clients have stats to show them that their ads don't work.

When TV dies, so will advertising as we know it.
I have a robot that does nothing but clean my floor. It was still well worth its price. "Do one thing and do it well."
New law (based on Godwin): Whoever invokes terrorists or 9/11 in a conversation unrelated to terrorism loses.

Incidentally, I agree with the rest of your post.
Well, I don't have 10 billion trillion dollars or whatever obscene amount of money the government thinks it can spend either. If you're going to pick an insurance company based on financial stability and sanity, the US government is probably the worst possible choice.
>> "They where hired under the same standards as you."

The problem is though the hiring process for programmers is often completely broken. Measuring good programmers is also broken in many companies, so bad programmers tend to just stay there instead of improving, or being fired.

I think being a good programmer isn't too hard if you have the talent, taste, time etc. Being recognized as a good programmer, and rewarded as such is harder.
Oh, you can put it as simple as:

If you think you are good, you are not.
If you think you have to improve, chances are you will become better.

(Life is baby steps; ask a baby...)
FAQ: The ins and outs of DoS attacks
I think it's... disappointing... when people say that OpenOffice is a Microsoft Office clone, especially when they append "let's be honest", like it's something every Linux user has to admit and live with, like we have no choice and it's a raw deal.

I disagree with that, or at least I really want to and think that changing that is possible and healthy to the bottom line outcome of what something like OOo can become. But we look at what position open office is placed in http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001215.html, yet OOo has the daunting task of being a true competitor against Microsoft office, an office suite backed by a huge organization, even when compared next to Sun. I guess, from their perspective, they can mimic all MS Office's features within OOo and offer their product for free, and maybe that's enough to compete, but then it doesn't make OOo much better than it's competitor, it really just makes it a free clone, which is disappointing because it can be so much more.

Personally, my experience with the ribbon was negative, I thought it took a lot of screen real estate (especially since I always worked on a laptop) and essentially disrupted my previous toolbar work flow that I had spent time customizing. Whether OOo is making a 1 to 1 copy of the ribbon, I don't know, I haven't used it in such a long time, i forget what it looks like, but the opinion on the matter seems clearly laid out on the topic link.

Now that they are doing a UI redesign, now is a good time to define themselves, a lot like how Blender is and always has defined itself with it's UI http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/blender-25-overview. What blender has done was always amazing, and now, with 2.5 they are doing it again! that's crazy! and no one would ever call Blender a maya clone, or a 3dsmax clone. So i think, cloning something isn't really healthy, you don't create an identity, and I fell now OOo has a chance to finally define itself, do a little UX research and really define itself for it's users, create a different and better user experience we look out for and talk about and really compete with MS Office by offering something new.

If they don't do this now, then it's as if (us Linux users) we're never going to amount to anything more than users of a Clone platform in the desktop space, and at that point, we might as well cede: http://lifehacker.com/5290955/mac4lin-gives-linux-desktops-t...
Why Build Email Lists of Your Own?
You should build email lists of your own. Those who operate their own internet marketing businesses know the challenges in finding targeted email leads. It’s a ongoing requirement to have a steady flow of highly targeted leads to ensure sales and conversions. This applies to all businesses whether offline or otherwise. Having a targeted optin email marketing list is critical to the success on the homebase web business.
That was nothing short of inspiring. I'm gonna do some biohacking this weekend - now - where did I put my eeg kit!
A gem:

The better part of learning is making mistakes, and most grading penalizes mistakes.

This is true; it makes students unadventurous. Fortunately, most science PhD programs already work nearly the way he's proposing:

- Students are attached to a lab early on, and mentored by a professor for the rest of the program

- Classes related to the degree usually allow enough flexibility in the assignments that a student can find a way to apply their lab's line of research to the current topic

- Students take 2-3 lecture-style courses and a scattering of seminars each semester for the first two years or so, then focus entirely on research (mentored, of course) for the rest of the program

- Grades are implicitly just a formality. Maybe not everyone figures this out, but you're doing things properly in science course, you will get an A. Don't even worry about it; just focus on your research and let the prof know you're learning something. In a PhD program, your report card is really your list of publications -- and that's another can of worms.

The biggest departures from this I see are in law, business and med schools, where there's a secondary goal of filtering students up front. (And they charge so much for the honor. Science grad school isn't so much a hefty up-front investment as a temporary oath of poverty.)

My program is a mix of CS, math/stats and biology, and it's interesting to see how the disciplines collide in the curriculum committee. CS and math/stats teachers do have a lot of material that simply must be lectured to students, with lots of targeted exercises along the way -- these professors push for more core courses. Science teachers constantly try to trim the core requirements so students can spend more time in the lab, doing real research, without distractions. I don't think this dynamic would have evolved if the department was simply following the rote lecture-and-exam tradition.
Perhaps because the design of those features were backed up by statistical improvement metrics?
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/11/573348.aspx
It doesn't matter how many tweets are spam, all that matters is how easy they are to filter out. And the answer is, pretty damn easy.

What Twitter needs is a way to filter the drivel that comes from humans.
Choosing Your Breast Cancer Treatment
Good question! The postgres solution was unexcusable, it was always used side-by-side with dbus. The other was around before any affordable[1] enterprise message busses existed, however as that changed the buggy solutions was still touted as "amazing new tech that keeps us ahead ofthe competion. No we can't switch to something else".

[1] Affordable being defined as: this particular company could pay for it without going out of business.
If we find out that Nazis caused 9-11, it will be the end of civilized internet discourse as we know it

(ok,ok! -- I deserve the downmod for that one. Just couldn't help myself)
Idea: Use two sidebars, one fixed to the left for formatting (never change its buttons so users don't get lost), one to the right that changes based on probable actions like working with tables as soon as you enter a table, or image manipulation, etc.

Leave just the menu on top for more vertical space for the document.

I'll use that.

ps. resize toolbars and use small icons when using monitors with resolution less than 1024x768.
What's on your top 10 security list?
(Southwest manages to take a similar approach without coming off as hostile to customers).

[Disclaimer: Raving Southwest fan.]

AFAIC, Southwest is better than almost every other airline in almost every other category. Why? Because they have built a business the way I would want to build one, with one thing in mind: the customer.

Almost everything they do is what the customer wants because someone bothered to ask. Whenever I fly another airline, the differences are noticeable and I ask, "Don't these people get it?"

Ryanair sounds like they're doing the same thing in a mechanical way. Once they engage their customers as Southwest has, they'll have raving fans too.
Anybody noticed the domain? Web18 group of India bought it for USD 1 million
What I love about your comment is that your idea is already possible with today's Open Office. Just no one takes advantage of it.
Small Banks Gain Cachet in Talent-Poaching Game
Also, where did this headline come from? Compare:

Canonical Will Own Your Search: New mandatory Ubuntu plugin takes over Firefox

vs.

Bug #402767: multisearch add on blocks the functionality of firefox location bar

And how many parts of the top one are actually true? Maybe none?
And something like 80% of US bankruptcies are due to unexpected medical bills.

This is simply unproven. There is a study by Elizabeth Warren who often makes this claim in the media, but her study does not prove it.

Her criteria for "medical bankruptcy" include, for example, a person who spends $50,000 on hookers/gambling/coke, and $1001 on syphilis treatment. She also has no control group.
I have done this too, particularly in small projects. One thing I try to do in these situations is imagine what functions would be useful should I extend the program later. Anther trick is to imagine a different pardigm, i.e. coding it up as a state machine.

What I gathered from the original article however, is a focus on those guys who will decompose long_function(params) into short_func1(params), the last line of which is return short_func2(params, 12 state params); .
I think LISP, Haskell and 'Learning Lisp' or 'Learning Haskell' is nothing one should take too literal.

I think the point behind such statements is the point, that Lisp and especially Haskell today are very, very advanced languages with very, very advanced and abstract concepts (best example: Monads.). If you 'Learn Haskell', or 'Learn Lisp', the speaker will usually mean: Learn these abstract and advanced concepts. Learn to love homoiconic languages such as Lisp, Factor, and learn to love the mathematic backgrounds in haskell, with its Monads, Types, Monoids and whatsoever. If you have groked those concepts, you will usually make a serious step on the ladder of good programmers.

However, as 'Learning Lisp', or 'Learning Haskell' are just a way to say to learn these very advanced concepts, it can be very possible that one knows these concepts by heart already. So, if you know functional programming, the most interesting part about lisp reduces to macros, pretty much. (I know, I will be bashed, because there will be one or two interesting features I forgot, because I did not venture into the LISP-Land too much, because the madness of interpreters and such was too big for me, but the point still stands.)
Java HTTP proxy servlet (with Spring)
Yeah I agree with that :) I think obviously you have to draw the line somewhere.
Any support at all for modules is really a requirement to be considered a serious Python implementation.

>>> import sys
don't have handler for: import_stmt

But otherwise, neato.
And while interesting, from Wales point of view, I'd be a bit mortified to have a deeply personal story told in perso to be printed on the web.
it is not a problem with OOP so much as it is with the abuse of OOP, which is easy to do. Bad developers put the work flow procedures in objects and treat it as if it can be used as traditional OOP. but the truth is that work flow is usually task specific and not reusable. It lends itself better to procedural programming. Good OOP programmers know to stuff this stuff in thread safe static subroutines(methods) and provide a service layer for all work flow. it should not be embedded in objects (i know technically the static methods are in an object). Unfortunately this has also caused another bad OO problem with anemic objects. If you look at MVC implementations like struts it has caused a new bad habit in which objects are used for nothing more than structures and all of the logic is implemented in the work flow. Reusable business logic should be implemented as methods on the object in which they relate to. User specific work flow should be abstracted away from the objects and the UI should be loosely coupled to the work flow through a service facade. Alternatively if you have a group of good OO programs you can implement the work flow elements in a reusable event based system where reusable paths can be developed and listeners can chain in for very specific non-reusable tasks, but this is very hard for a junior to follow so many good developers opt for the first pattern because it allows them to train new developers on the system, without having to teach a programmer event based techniques. I don't know why it is so hard for people to grasp OO, but it does seem like it is much easier to create a hideous unwieldy beast with it, than procedural, in the hand of the wrong developer. Conversely, some of the most elegant systems that I have seen where done with OO languages and properer delineation between the data systems the business model and logic, the work flow and the interface.

Anyway, long story short when I see a huge stack chain, general they are either do anemic objects and just hacking up the big controller procedure into a bunch of little functions or they are doing OO work flow, either of which is not an appetizing prospect to support or fix. Evey once and a while you will get someone that is doing factory patterns everywhere which can create a lot of deep dives down the stack to figure out that the 17 methods deep stack finally results in one method creating a object.

P.S. Private subroutines do not have to be reusable public ones should be. The author did not specify. so I hope and assume he was talking about public subroutines.
Good start, but it needs a car chase and a gun battle.
His blog post is a bit long, but do at least read the end of it, which is great. Silicon Valley is rife with stories of coulda, woulda, shoulda, nd this is one of the better ones.
The Apple student discount isn't "hefty." They are a little less than 10%. Typically $100 off laptops less than $1500, $150 off $1500-$2000 and $200 off $2000. Late summer they usually throw in an iPod for free. It's not a bad deal overall, but refurbs are the way to go if you need a real discount.
I'm pretty sure that most luggage is lost when connecting at a busy airport, and there's some kind of glitch in the baggage handling at the airport. It's doesn't have to be a system-wide failure, just a single truck-driver running late, because a loading-team is two down because of the flu, and 100 bags miss their connections. Naturally, they are given lowest priority (when running behind, better get as many bags as possible on the right flight in time - whats it worth moving one bag that's already missed its flight, instead of one that has a chance of making it).

The bag lie around until evening when the pace slows down, and the remaining bags are routed to the relevant flight. But it might be a while until a there's flight in the relevant direction, and there might not be enough room on it.

At the destination airport, the bag waits around for a courier pickup, and that might take a while, because the airline wants to get as many bags as possible on the same pickup, because it's cheaper/easier.

I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure: At NO point during this process doesn't the airline know exactly where the bag is. Barcodes are not at fault here, RFID won't fix it -- the problem is overloaded systems, delayed flights and overly optimistic connection-times are.

They don't tell you this, because it's simply easier not to. If they telling you one thing, they'll soon end up rationalizing every single decision they take regarding every bag to everybody. It sucks but the alternative sucks more.

Upgrading baggage handling is expensive, and there are only the carriers, which in turn means the passagers, to pay for that.
A new way of keeping private correspondence private
I don't know if you've tried this, but if you write down some pseudocode before you really get started, the logical chunks of the program will take their names straight from the pseudocode.
What they probably did was hand out shirts to the employees to look snappy for the visiting dignatary. Most companies I've worked for try to do the same. Some require higher "dress levels" when visitors are coming (like the current one says "no shorts & flip flops; use business casual" only on days when important-enough outsiders come by.
I find articles like this strange.

Strange because I've created sites, and I know that the reasons to carry on doing something morphs over time but that when asked it's easy to apply things that affect us now to our actions in the past.

That is, I suspect that we are constantly re-writing our own view of history based on personal experiences.

So I find them strange because the question is being asked now, rather than then. And that means that the success of the project, in this case Wikipedia, and it's resulting effect on the world (or however that should be phrased) has already happened. And out of that unforeseen and unpredicted effects have also happened. And that now, armed with the knowledge of the current effects it's always easy to declare that said effect was actually our intent.

The article is clearly touching. But I wonder whether it really was an epiphany moment that created the motivation to create Wikipedia or whether it's closer to what I suspect which is that it wasa small action that was the right thing at the right time, that has snow-balled into something vastly greater, and that now it's easy to re-interpret the original small action into being of greater meaning than it is.

Of course, I also suspect I'm just a cynic.
Excellent point. Another to add to the list is that you may easily have been hired under a higher standard as the team lead or "working/programming manager".

I have been fortunate to never work with a bad programmer, but I have worked with inexperienced programmers that were learning as they went. I was not hired under the same standard or for the same reason they were.
If they knew where stuff was, they wouldn't lose it, something which happens so frequently that, last time I checked, I couldn't find anyone who would sell me luggage insurance over a very low amount.

Funny story: my uncle used to work for a company that sold baggage systems. They once lost a body, being sent home to its final resting place, for a few days. Ooops!
Consumers with a Conscience
Driven by Generation Y, the conscience has finally become a major factor in all consumer-based decisions.
Yahoo's Missed Opportunity: The Social Web
That's 20 images and links to "PSD to HTML" tutorials. No further information or a preselection.
Submitter exclusively submits bestpsdtohtml.com links.
It's enabled 'by default', but it's still a regular Firefox extension that can be turned off easily.

Comment #2 by Alexander Sack reads:

Thanks. To workaround you can disable the extension in tools -> addons.

Later Adam Bielinsky fleshes it out:

At the moment, every user on a machine has to click Tools, then Addons, then Extensions, then Multisearch, then Disable, and then restart Firefox.
So, he never said why his account was suspended.
I agree with your sentiment, and although I generally agree with the parent, I also disagree with the statement that "[t]hey where hired under the same standards as you". Few companies look for programming talent and I've seen this being hand waved away by statements like: "good programmers don't necessarily make good employees".

But on the whole, the article also leaves a sour taste in my mouth due to the superiority complex that cuts through it.

Good programmers won't effect much change at companies that have broken hiring practices. Rather move somewhere where your skills will be appreciated.