skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm curious about the book. Why not simply publish it digitally? Why go through "traditional" publishers?
Programs will write themselves using genetic algorithms and assorted machine learning techniques, and programmers will then become truly slaves of the machine. Then again, maybe I've been reading too much science-fiction...
DRM free Amazon music store was just a tool for the record industry to put pressure on Apple.
The Pirate Bay to Become a Distributed Storage Cloud?
copy of a /. article, if you want the article it's here:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/07/17/1739239/The-Pira...
Was Aptana in YC?
Your response makes no sense at all. It's completely unrelated to what I said. People don't need to "know about DRM" in order to be pissed off when stuff they bought disappears.
I don't understand that reasoning. If you've got to got to WSGI at some point anyway, why not straight away?
I don't know about Aptana Cloud (when I looked at it they had very bad Linux support) but their JavaScript IDE is pretty nice.

My current project has (in the development version - cleaned up by the deployment scripts) about 10 source files and it handles auto complete for objects and methods quite well despite that. It breaks a bit on methods added via Object.prototype.method but as soon as you use them once its catches it and remembers it.
So you can use Catalyst, a wonderful web framework.
"books aren't magically going to become DRM-free without first becoming digital, and there's no way that's going to happen except under whatever terms the publishers choose to impose."

Oh, so to get rid of DRM, we should first swallow the pill and make ourselves dependent on it. Then, when we are completely at the mercy of DRM, it will magically go away over night. Makes sense - NOT!
hehe, the 'novix' gets mentioned, we had a pre-production unit of that chip back in the stone age :)

Quite amazing how fast it was for its day, we used it for some real time image recognition (license plate scanning) demonstrations.
It's the only form of art I am able to create.
When is the novel coming out - title?
This post encouraged me to stop
Funny nobody mentionned Singularity : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_%28operating_system...

A microsoft research project that reminds me a lot of yours

Kudos for all the hard work by the way. Your project is highly interresting
Ten years from now, will not be much more different. Essentially computing needs a breakthrough to move to the next level. What this breakthrough is nobody knows. A program written in the latest fashionable language of to-day is essentially not much more different from one written in Cobol or Fortran or Ada 30 years ago. We refining the tools but not discovering any new fundamentals.

I expect such a breakthrough to be achieved via two possible paths:

(a) By brute force : the effect of interconnecting the worlds information via the internet.

(b) Parallel processing to be stimulated further by breakthroughs in bio-informatics.
Imagine any large software product, open source or otherwise, with 10+ years of history and a large team behind it. Now imagine that large team disbanded and assigned to other projects. That's the problem of Oracle not supporting it.

There is this myth of large open source projects being built collectively by thousands of individual developers in their bedrooms. It doesn't actually work that way. MySQL has a large onsite development team that until recently drew their salary from Sun. If their new bosses decided to pull the plug, that would be a big deal.
How do you suggest they gather good entropy on Win2k and WinCE, then? If you actually do have a better idea, I'd be willing to try my own hand at turning it into a patch, so let's hear it :)
There's argument and reasoning in the bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501605) and other items linked to from that discussion.

Long story short: some of the Windows versions that libnss runs on are unable to provide as much entropy as libnss's PRNG wants to be seeded with, without resorting to gathering it from places like the tempfiles directory.
In future we will all work for Google: L.A. govmt - Google cloud?
I disagree. We're talking about the most closed-off and spiteful technology company here (who do make very pretty products). Not only that, but why in the world would the "security" issue be a more logical when Tim Cook said the following:

"However, we will not stand for having our IP [intellectual property] ripped off, and we’ll use whatever weapons that we have at our disposal. I don’t know that I can be clearer than that." [1]

[1]: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/01/26/apple...
It is the only activity that I do that is purely logical. In a world that is run on 'emotions', 'sentiments' and 'politics' being able to apply pure logic when communicating (albeit with a machine) is immensely rewarding.
National VC $ recovering; So Cal VC $ still tanked
The big difference between programmers and non-programmers is that the latter seem to fail to grasp that computers are universal machines/tools. That you can make them do almost anything you want and simulate entire universes inside them. Or use them to solve any kind of problem.

How can't you love this?

Non programmers, on the other hand, tend to identify the computer with the software already available and known by them.

Programming also means (at least ideally) being able to talk directly with the computer. It means being able to perform boring and time consuming tasks in a fraction of the time.

Non-programmer users get frustrated so easily with computers because they're in a foreign land and they don't know the language. They can go to the station and take a bus if they know which one would bring them wherever they need to go. But they can't ask for directions.

Compare, for instance, the expressiveness of the unix shell with GUIs when you want to perform a specific task on a particular subset of files/data.

That's why I think that programming should be something available to (and acknowledged by) every user.
I think that Martin Fowler hits the nail on the head with Illustrative Programming: "When you look at a spreadsheet, the formulae of the spreadsheet are not immediately apparent, instead what you see is the calculated numbers - an illustration of what the program does. [...] Using examples as a first class element of a programming environment crops up in other places - UI designers also have this. Providing a concrete illustration of the program output helps people understand what the program definition does, so they can more easily reason about behavior."[1]

Illustrative Programming will fit particularly well with, and benefit from, programs that collect, crunch, and display data - this being area that I agree will see a lot of growth and attention.[2] "The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades,"[3]

Tools that are more suitable for large and complex data sets than Excel, and easier to use than R will become available. These will be used, as many current programming languages are, by people that are not trained in software development. Visualization will become much more important, so programming tool usability will improve. We'll see the influence of statisticians in our programming tools. Chasing down posts by others with similar problems and bugs will become easier. I'm not sure how much headway Illustrative Programming will make into the more hackerish areas of programming, though I hope it's a fair bit. For the best predictions on what languages will be like, just look critically at the languages that are at the start of their lifespans now (http://mythryl.org/ ? Arc?) and also at current research.

I think, though, that the most interesting changes will come from the sort of programs we'll be writing, the sort of people we'll be working with, and the sort of tools we'll have available, rather than from some feature x or y of some future major language.

[1] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/IllustrativeProgramming.html
[2] http://flowingdata.com/2009/06/04/rise-of-the-data-scientist...
[3] http://flowingdata.com/2009/02/25/googles-chief-economist-ha...
What's wrong, still thinking about that marijuana thread? Don't worry, we all believe you have really severe back pain... ;-)
I don't think the format was ever really the problem; people are willing to put up with all sorts of conversion shite to get things up on the web (FLV, for example.) IE's problem was entirely that it was ahead-of-its-time in this regard: fonts were too big on yesterday's internet to download at a decent clip for instant display, and there weren't any open fonts that anyone was interested in using.
How true.

I would like to do more things with physical computing, for instance. But I always end up concentrating on software only projects.
By any objective measure, iTunes has a monopoly with 87% market share in 2008. [1] Therefore, it can claimed that any actions against competitors can be construed as abusing monopoly power. Yes, there are other media players and other phones and other ways to buy media. However, the precedent is clear that Apple has "enough" of a monopoly to take these claims seriously. These claims are at least as serious as those launched against Microsoft in the 90's and in the EU-led accusations currently.

[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10213149-93.html
if you submit these polls after smoking, you should immedeately stop smoking, and start working for your start-up.
I think you underestimate the usefulness of option 2 - especially in form of the original code + a patch to work with Django 1.0.
I was once an academic, but these days I'm both in industry and science/maths popularisation. I try to attract people to my site to get them engaged with the material I write, and then try to keep them engaged and interested. Perhaps they will then ask me to come and speak for them.

When I write something and put it on my web site it's because I want people to visit. Their engagement with the site lets me get sponsorship to run the site, and potentially speaking engagements. Speaking engagements lose me money, because I take unpaid leave from my job in industry to do them, but I think enrichment in education is important, and I'm willing to give up money to help make it happen.

Think of it effectively as volunteer work.

If material is ripped off wholesale and stored somewhere else, or if essays/articles are shown on another site without the visitor coming to my site, I lose my traffic, potentially I lose my sponsorship, and certainly I lose my opportunities to provide enrichment in schools. Doing what scribd does undermines that.

Other people have other reasons for people to visit their sites, but mine alone mean that I hate what scribd does. I think it's unethical and parasitical.
Yup, mine works perfectly. They never messed with it. I'm using a 1st gen. iPhone with 3.0 software.
Facebook and Twitter on TV: Hands-On with Verizon FiOS's New Widgets
You seem to imply that Python scripting is less advanced than C++? Certainly, C++ is (unnecessarily) harder to learn and use.

You can still learn programming today easily. Command lines are still available.
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The GPSMAP 76S adds a built-in electronic compass and barometric altimeter, an Americas, European or Pacific basemap and 24 megabytes (MB) of map storage space to the other outstanding features of the mariner-friendly 76-series navigators.
> I can't recall a time I clicked a PDF link and then later surfed the related site.

I do this all the time. When I read something interesting I figure the author probably has other interesting things to say. I wander around for a while and see what else they have to offer. I've found some real gems in that way, and made some life-long friends.

I don't mind if my material gets read elsewhere, but I use it as an enticement to engage with my site. When someone else points to it, that purpose is fulfilled. When they copy it elsewhere, it isn't. When they additionally reload it everytime, I get no benefit and and pay for the bandwidth.

I can't see anything good in their actions at all.
Yahoo Search Ad Deal With Microsoft Imminent
Perhaps. But who's mourning for the good old time of Cobol today?
Programs written in say Prolog, Haskell or Curry are definitely different than Cobol or Fortran or Ada 30 years ago. And different from Lisps (and perhaps ML) of that time too.
What is life for if not 'singing "Alouette" while dancing the robot'
How to redirect wordpress.com blog to self hosted domain
This is a lot of rambling and a strange approach for what is effectively a 3-liner...

./configure --prefix=/opt/my_python
make && make install
export PATH="/opt/my_python/bin:$PATH"
20 years ago we wrote lisp on emacs, and we still do. The only thing that has changed is that the machines used for developing and running our programs have gotten faster. There haven't really been any gamechanging breakthroughs in software in that time. Chances are that there won't be in the next 20 years either.
AutoPilot for Our Brain Allows Multitasking Efficiency
Your body is NOT going to just "discard" (poop out) "un-needed" calories.

Are you sure of that? I'll offer myself up as a datapoint. My weight is exactly (to the kg) the same as it was 12 years ago. I do not exercise, at all, and eat pretty much whatever I want, whenever I want (and that's a lot.) For comparison purposes, my sister-in-law runs a few miles every day, and consumes less than half the calories that I do-- and her weight has also remained constant for the past decade.

Her incoming calorie-count is much less than mine, and her calories expended is much higher than mine. If my body does not discard un-needed calories, how is it that she's not losing weight, and I'm not gaining weight?

(By the way: I worked for Ben & Jerry's for several years, and ate a pint of ice cream every single day. No weight gain, and only a marginal rise in my cholesterol count.)
Wikipedia contributor sued for uploading images
I did C++ as my first real OO language. It was quite a lot.

I don't think it'd be hard to learn C++ if you knew C and Java (or a scripting language with OO).

Courses that start programming with C++ seems to teach a subset first ("a better C").

Edit: Disclaimer: A few years after learning C++, I skipped all the low level stuff and almost only do scripting languages. I might not be C++'s largest fan. :-)
I hate to say it but 10 years isn’t that long a time. Keep in mind the HTML 4 spec was approved about 12 years ago and we’re still using it. So I think a lot of the building blocks we’ll be using in 10 years are probably already taking shape (HTML5 for example)

That said I think the improvements we will see in 10 years will be based around the maturation of frameworks. In just about every environment, be it Rails or .Net or whatever, you see programming in general moving to a higher level. People using mature algorithms to focus only on what they need to customize and in doing so making programs that are easier to use while being a lot more stable.

I think that leads to the 20 year question. As programs become more stable and a generation of kids grows up with computers they trust not to crash I think you’ll see computing in general change. Add that to cheap, widespread touch screens and I think you’ll see a lot of things that are currently "physical" become "virtual". You can already see this now with things like EC2 which turns physical computers into virtual constructs that can be manipulated through software.

Think about it. Other than your oven or refrigerator what else do you even have in your house that couldn’t be made virtual? Your entertainment system, your computer, your alarm clock, etc... can all be moved "behind the screen". Even the oven and fridge can be made into components that interface with a virtual console.

That’s when the fun really begins for programmers because that’s when we get into the business of creating virtual worlds. I don’t know how that will take shape exactly as far as programming is concerned but I assume you’ll start to see hybrid functionality where physical interaction becomes a lot more important than back end functionality (which again will be largely covered by frameworks at that point). In many ways it will probably mirror how physical electronics are created now. Most electronics are built using pre-fab Integrate Circuits that do most of the work. The manufacturer just creates an appearance and a user interface.

Anyway, that’s one man’s opinion.
Not just could, but as the parent comment implied, given the nature of the system the answer is unequivocally yes.

The system serves to record the arrows you've clicked, therefore this information must be stored somewhere.
Someone with access to this this information should be able to determine "what stuff an account upvoted," unless the system has been designed to obfuscate the connections(i.e. accounts & clicked items) at the database level.
actually, for me it goes to the article. if you got sent to the registration page, that probably means you've already viewed a couple of articles on the nytimes site lately and they're trying to nudge you in the right direction.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699713
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GTD guru David Allen goes digital
I think I'll give that a go. I do a reasonable amount of cycling and walking, but it would be interesting to see where my current fitness level puts me on that scale.
No it's not. You missed the fact that python packages that include stuff like scripts hardcode the full, explicit prefix in the #! lines. This means you can compile with --prefix all you want, but if you move it, everything breaks in unexpected ways.

I agree, all you should need is a --prefix, and that scripts should obey whatever python interpreter is in /usr/bin/env - but that's not the way it works, sadly.
O'Brien: What Is Google? (i.e., *will* it eat your children?)
Fuller's view of the world ...
As one person who downvoted it, I apologize. My subconscious spam detector went crazy when I read that comment, and I just instinctively clicked the down arrow. I quickly realized my mistake after reading the reply, but unfortunately we can't undo votes here.

The good thing about HN, however, is that incorrect scores for comments are corrected pretty quickly by others.
New Feature on Bits: NY Times taps Publish2 to aggregate
This is a quite common misunderstanding among iPhone developers.

For instance, I'm starting to use TinyScheme embedded in my code. Pretty sweet.
Because it immediatelly gives a binary feedback whether I'm correct or not.
It works pretty well for me. I also keep a rough running total of my daily calories - not hard to do after a week or so. Progress is gradual, but sustainable.

I'm posting monthly updates to flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexfarran/sets/721576162210862...
I've recently been hunting around on HN to find various things to support or refute points made in discussions. One thing I stumbled across was

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366692

which then reminded me of this:

http://searchyc.com/Dymaxion?sort=by_date

Reading this comment:

Another fun fact that impressed me: If you
dumped all the people of the world in Texas,
it will have the same population density as
New York city.

... reminded me that even though Texans believe their state is big, if you cut Alaska in half, each half would be bigger (in area) than Texas.

I'm starting to find that searches on HN give me excellent references to primary source material. This community is one of the best places I've found for reasoned discussion, thought-provoking ideas, apoplexity-inducing comments, and pointers to investigate further.

Thank you.

EDIT: I am also reminded of these:

http://xkcd.com/214/ & http://xkcd.com/386/
Only on the 'surface'. For example write a program to add a+b!
The 'language ' maybe different but not the concepts. I am arguing that we need a fundamental breakthrough.
I don't think that is strictly limited to programmers.

When I was a student, I heard even law students and economists make more or less tha same arguments about their subjects.

That is, there are collections of rules you could handle like games and/or machines, pulling different strings and adjusting to make them do what you want.

(Chemistry and physics are other obvious subjects.)

Of course, the non-programmers' wimpy systems aren't real Turing machines... :-)
Well, I expect that most programming language research in the next 10 years would focus on exploiting multicore programming. If we're lucky, we'll all be using something like Haskell or Erlang, and all apps will be multithreaded. Languages that choose to ignore multicore will slowly suffocate. Writing multithreaded apps will become much easier than it is now, if not trivial.

It's not wrong to dream, is it? :)
Thanks, I knew the law but hadn't seen the original article. It's eerie how broadly it applies -- as another example, my degree program has 5 tracks. One of the tracks is an utterly essential topic, really the core of the discipline, and the other 4 map directly onto the tangential research areas that the most influential professors cluster into. Guess which track is being cut this year...
good article http://www.sitepoint.com/article/hierarchical-data-database/
Eric Schmidt Interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival
HN stores the links you upvoted, you can view that list by clicking on the number of saved items in your profile.

Don't know about votes on comments.
I don't think there is any indication whatsoever that programming the equivalent of a Turing machine will become any more "illustrative" than it has ever been. 20 years back we had buzzwords like "query by example" and we (almost) had VisualBasic.

What has changed since then? Certainly not much in terms of programming productivity. What has changed is that we program the web now instead of a PC or a Mainframe. The architecture has changed. Esthetics have changed. Collaboration has changed. And we can crunch a lot more numbers now. Programming hasn't changed much.

And I think it won't change in the next 20 years unless some hard AI problems can be solved.
Building a successful project
This reminds me of a discussion here a few days ago in which people were happily bashing java's classpath. I don't know anything about python, but my feeling at their comparison of java and python was that something that is way too simple to use can't be at the same time easy to customize.

In the light of this article classpaths sound a lot like what they really are: a working compromise everybody can live with.
Why do you have to look up what a calorie is? 25% of something works the same way regardless of units. The words more and less retain their meaning regardless of units. The article could have used playstation3-hours and nothing would change.
While we're on the subject, I sometimes see some weird behavior with voting, in particular sometimes my vote doesn't "stick" until the 2nd or 3rd try. It only seems to be down-voting. And sometimes on the second vote it actually drops two points.

Anyone else notice things like that?

Or maybe I'm going crazy.