skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We thought TypeKit's web fonts were cool, but then we tried Kernest.
NPR is a first class operation and one which I love to listen to all day long.
Profoundly unconvinced.
Ask HN: Does your cable ISP suck?
Does your Internet Service at home or work ever seem slow at times? Do you often have to unplug and replug your modem and wireless router at random times to get back online? Does this frustrate you?

It happens to me too much.

We have Comcast Cable Internet Service at our house(up to 12Mbps) and it generally works great but:

* sometimes it is painfully slow.

* oftentimes it is more like medium than fast.

* at least once per week we have to go downstairs and unplug/plug-in the modem and router.

* I have no idea the extent of the problem because I don't have a tool that measures the speed of my internet access throughout the day!

I know from experience and talking to people that this is a BIG problem that happens in offices and homes across the U.S.

Does this happen to you? How do you deal with it? Do you know of any software that can measure my internet provider's performance?

(P.S. Shameless plug: If a solution doesn't exist, I plan on writing one and you can own it by bidding here: http://jobpic.com/a221 )
In the comments the question "why" pops up quite a few times, here is my try on it.

1.) It's a cool hack (if you like C++)

2.) It's pretty useful if you develop for an embedded environment (embedded webservers etc.) and need to avoid GPL'd code
Well something perhaps relevant from the FAQ:

LostMyDoggie.com, LLC is classified and registered as an exempt organization by the DNC, thus we can phone your neighbors who are on the Do Not Call List.
I worked with Roger Gregory for a few weeks in 1999, 4 years after this article was written. He still hadn't recovered from Xanadu. I got the impression that he never really would.
World future society
The cost would prohibit teenagers.

How effective would: "Your neighbour "Buy lots of Acme products" has lost their dog." be?
I finished up my masters degree in computer science last December. To celebrate I traveled to Japan, SKorea, China, Taiwan, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Comoros Islands, Seychelles Islands, Israel, Jordan, England, and Hungary. I did this all in about two months. An entire month in east Asia, a week in Israel.

I traveled a lot before that too: Russia, Czech Republic, Central America, Vietnam (3 times), Japan twice, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Canada, England, France, Purto Rico, Dominican Republic, and a few more. I built up a lot of airline miles over the last couple of years and used that on my last world trip. The biggest cost was my hotels, I didn't go cheap.

Traveling is the best thing I've done with my life. I'm 30 years old and feel like I have lived several lifetimes with all of the experiences and people I met through my travels.

Go for it. And one piece of advice... live debt free as I have so you can do those things. It's not worth going into debt over. You can always take shorter trips like I did. My longest was two months. I was able to keep working and finish up school while doing that.

If I can recommend places, Israel, Japan, and Vietnam are my favorite. China was the worst place I've ever been. If you want to experience China, go to Taiwan.
I think that's a matter of perception. Much has been said about what exactly design patterns are, but my personal take is that they're a linguistic tool rather than a how-to. Every craft or art has a catalogue of terms that they use to describe the specifics of the practice. For programming, these are "patterns". Novices learn them because those who came before realized these practices were the foundation of the craft and thus deserved names. But in and of themselves they are not useful save as the most high level of guides (and let's face it, no one implements an exact copy-as-presented of Fowler's Visitor pattern).

Which is my long-winded way of saying: Yes, I think so. :)
With Fwix iPhone App, All a Cub Reporter Needs Is a Scoop
In principle you might be onto something but I think the pricing etc. and cost of running this service makes use it when you need it more appropriate.

At $29/year you'd have to hope that only 1 in 5 (perhaps even less) owners actually used your service in a year. What about that lady down the road who's dog gets out each week?
That's why it is sometimes safer to hire developers with some open source background. You are able to actually read their code and (if you really want to know the person) their mailing lists messages.
Someone else started it, but Knuth continued it. So two people made mistakes. It's understandable and I might do the same in his situation (once I'm important enough for an article, of course). But it's still against policy and if it continued some people's articles would read like blogs.
On the one hand, this reads like "I prefer functional languages, and want to twist procedural languages into a form I'm more familiar with". On the other hand, I do find his re-written example more readable, and I'm not sure if that's due to my previous exposure to functional programming, some innate readability bestowed by the functional programming style, or just the fact that this particular code was rewritten by someone who wanted to make it a publishable example (as opposed to just getting it to work).
Technically Interesting
The Basics: VPATH and vpath
A Hired Gun for Microsoft in Dogged Pursuit of Google
I wouldn't be surprised if it were lower, but I would love to see some real statistics in play.
The anonymity and lack of personal accountability provided by the internet rarely have good effects. What's interesting is how fervently people fight to protect this anonymity, even though it doesn't really exist when we interact with strangers in the real world.

I'm not saying that online privacy is worthless of course, just noting that it is quite unique.
Metaphors We Live By
I came across this a month or so ago. It deals with metaphor in an interesting way. Instead of relegating it to being a mere linguistic twist it explores how metaphor underlies the very way we understand the world around us.

I found my first reference to it on c2 while poking around for AI texts. It isn't an AI text itself, but the information is insightful and likely applicable. I came across a few chapters online as well as a review on Peter Norvig's home site, which convinced me to pick it up from my local library.

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?MetaphorsWeLiveBy

http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html

http://norvig.com/mwlb.html
At home I have Time Warner Business Cable 15mb down, 2mb up. The speed tests always report near-advertised speeds, and connectivity is reasonably reliable.
C++ is not Ocaml, and Mozilla is not random-opensource-project. When you're contributing to an established project, you follow the conventions there even if they aren't what you'd consider ideal.

Brendan Eich even said as much in the comments of the bug: he'd rather be programming in a pure, expression-based manner too, but C++ is not Ocaml. And for a lot of C++ code, no-else-after-return works reasonably well.
Once I had a job in high school I can say that a fair bit of my friends' collective budget was directed into the prank fund. $125 to spread unscrupulous rumors regarding our school principal to 750 homes would not have deterred us.
The voting mechanism certainly does help, but only to a point. Imagine a "new" page where only 1 in 10 posts are worthy of upvoting (about the same as now.) Now, after some growth, imagine that changing so only 1 in 100 are valuable. Then one in a thousand. If you don't weed out bad submitters, it eventually becomes so hard to find the things that are interesting that you either start "grading on a curve" and just upvoting the best of what you can see—thus creating schlock like Reddit and Digg have—or you give up and move on to another site.

To put it in telecommunications terms: you need to keep the signal clear throughout transmission. If the clarity drops, amplifying it again (through a process like voting) will only pick up the bits that survived, and will also amplify some of the noise in the process. If we can eliminate the sources of noise, however, then we don't have to amplify.
This service seems in line with Magic Jack and WebKinz. Software designed for lower tech experiences people who value utility, but not a pure pixel based experience.

This class of startup is really interesting. From what I've read MagicJack could do $100MM in revenue and WebKinz is a cash factory throwing off $750MM per year. Both utilize software, but it isn't the lead aspect of the service.

These companies really fly under the radar relative to the other hot startups of the day. ReadWriteWeb covers them to some degree, but it is an area that deserves a LOT more coverage.
no matter how bad it gets?
A minor quibble. He claims that "no-elses" are prone to side-effects and "error-prone junk". However, "no-elses" are in my opinion as flagrant a crime as "no-braces" following if statements (which appears to be his style). The author says that he prefers the ternary operator (a > b ? a : b) to "no-elses"; however, its use is definitely more error-prone!
I always go a step further, and use at most one "return" in a function.

I find short-cut "return" statements frustrating for many reasons. For example, there's a risk that proper cleanup will not always happen, it is harder to see state and program flow when debugging, and it's no longer simple to make every-case changes by adding things to the end of the function. They're really just another type of "goto".

The only "advantages" I can think of are saving a few keystrokes, and having slightly better performance by not using a variable for the return value. In my experience, neither of those things has ever mattered.

In other words, I'd do this:

<type> result = defaultValue;
if (condition)
{
result = val1;
}
else
{
result = val2;
}
return result;

With this approach, there is never anything after the "return", "else" or otherwise.
Letting an opportunity like that slide (from the perspective of US employers) cals in to question the US' supposed non socialist system.
Interesting evolutionary pathway. Biomimicry was a big fad in mechanical and industrial design when I was in school. I wonder if this kind of "nature" story could lead to innovations (or at least thought tangents) in coding or user interface.
Oh, wow, you're right. (Tip: You have to unlock the Accounts pref pane first to make it show up.) I haven't tried this out, but I almost want to now.
Colombian president catches swine flu
You are all focusing too much on the C++ argument.

This framework will support all mainstream languages like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET being the first one to do this.

And it will offer full programming language interoperability (for example PHP code call C++ code or any combination of languages).

All this with the features it would expect from an Web framework and ORM.
I disagree completely [with the second paragraph.] You're trying to force people that aren't a community, people that don't share the same interests, to enjoy only certain topics—to artificially impose community upon multiple distinct masses. It doesn't work. The only way to create a community is to ensure that the people that belong post, and the people that don't, don't. They won't "eventually get the point", because for every one person that gives up, three more will discover HN for the first time. You have to tell them the point. Otherwise, we're just doing the "community summoning" cargo cult raindance without understanding what a community is: people that impose social mores on one another to create homogeneity of interest, for the better.
where would you suggest digging to uncover the motive of illiterate bureaucrats from 2500 years ago?

I imagine it should be easy compared to uncovering the motives of living politicians in information societies.
RestMS - Enterprise Messaging via REST + HTTP
Woah - did he write the book "The Humane Interface"? I just finished reading that a few days ago, it totally changed my views in regards to interface and even coding style.
Why do projects name Xanadu always seems to mean some boondoggle?

Xanadu is a name of a mall in Jersey that was supposed to open in 2007 but got pushed back next summer. Even then, it might not even survive the recession.

I guess the lesson is never call your projects Xanadu or Duke Nukem Forever.
I write this way, religiously, and literally every teammate I've worked with has been frustrated by it. I agree with all your arguments (and I'll add another one, which is that it makes the code itself easier to instrument --- which is why I started doing it), but I've been convinced not to try to convince others of it.
Just use whatever seems clearer
Singularity University Grads Plan to Help a Billion People in 10 Years
The advantage is that you can access C++ code from just about every language. Therefore, you can use the same framework to write PHP, Python, Java, or .Net code.
Download (fluxus)
Good to know. Thanks for the data point!
What's his argument about purity here? His examples rely on global state which is inherently impure. Rewriting them to make it more expression like does nothing to change that.
Are you advocating total awareness of the world? Total immersion in both refulgent horror and terrible wonder? Constant consideration of ounce of harm you inflict on the world around you? An unclosing eye toward this miracle of entropy we call home? Unending empathy toward every single person you pass and even those you never meet. Total awareness that your own personal self has quite possibly culminated and now has only got forty years of slowly turning to dust.

At some point you've got to shield your eyes; or, put it differently, find an interpretation you're comfortable with and settle down. Who can claim to not lie to themselves every day just to put their next foot forward? Even if you can see the honor, the honesty, in living that way I highly doubt you can survive.

If you can, write a book about it. I think David Foster Wallace tried.

Life isn't science. If you can go to a museum and enjoy the paintings, you can embellish the way you interpret your own sight. And if you're going to do it, why not pick a beautiful story?
[video]Best tip for success in life.
Introduction to OpenCL (videos)
Snow Leopard, the latest addition to the OS X family, has a new and very powerful feature called services.

hasn't mac (or at least os x) always had services? right now in leopard my firefox has a services menu with a whole bunch of different text-processing functions. i've never used services but i always assumed they were integral to mac os.
I tend to do this too, but I'm not convinced yet that I'm doing the right thing. I'd love to hear other opinions on this style.
Seymour Cray, the penultimate "tall, thin man."
Agreed. This account of his 4am workouts and non-stop icing routine on gameday is truly inspiring:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=4068270

I like Kobe more than Lebron more for this very reason. He compensates for his relatively inferior size with superior work ethic.
I always go a step further, and use at most one "return" in a function.

I opt for one return per exit type. For example:

* If I have a success/failure function, I will have "return (0);" and "return (1);" statements.

* If I have a pointer-or-fail function (e.g., an object constructor), I will have "return (r);" and "return (NULL);" statements.

* If I have a true/false/fail function (e.g., check if a file exists; return 1 if it exists, return 0 if it doesn't exist, and return -1 if something failed such that we couldn't figure out if the file exists), I will have "return (0);", "return (1);", and "return (-1);" statements.

In trivial functions, this tends to make my code somewhat more verbose than necessary; but I've found that sticking to this coding style dramatically reduces the odds of me making mistakes when I come back to code later and modify it, since different exit types usually require different cleanup code.
My experience with 3D engines doesn't extend much beyond an undergrad project I did, but even that was enough to read this list and smile knowingly at a good chunk of it.
from what i remember, the prompt is part of the framework and will ask the user to confirm twice before saving it as a default answer.
But both signal and noise are completely subjective terms to the community. What some people may consider quality posts, others may consider that noise. That's why you need voting that reflects whether the total community considers an article signal or noise.

Perhaps the solution would come somewhere from tweaking the front page display based on votes, or even customizing displays based on past voting practices from users, but I certainly do not believe that condemning the submitter is the solution. If that were followed through, I believe that the only articles that would eventually make it through the submission process come from a community that consistently echoes back the same interests to one another, without ever deviating from the norm.
Hacker News | Ask HN: Does your cable ISP suck?
I agree somewhat with the point he's making. While entertaining, these types of blog posts adds little value to the choice of platform. Things like available resources, customer base and running costs are more important than if it's pretty. Start your own company, not an application provider for/with platform X. A lot of companies fail anyway, and many who succeed end up doing something else than they thought they would do.
can you explain more of the appeal?

(apologies, but i am going to explain my opinion here before waiting for you to answer. eit.)

i stopped watching 75-85% of the way through. i couldn't take all the "you know"s, "like"s and "um"s.

i'm not sure if the content wasn't appealing to me, or if her explanation was unexciting.

when i see great art or learn something awesome i feel something lift inside me. i have an emotional connection. this drew a blank.

i was a little surprised, since the blog post made sense to me. i agree with other commenters who mention have this fuzzy concept but not seeing it discussed in public much less defined.

for a "best" TED talk i'd recommend http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...

she's a good speaker. there are other excellent speakers, too.

maybe the "worked on 8hrs a day for 6 weeks" build up raised my expectations, but she sounded nervous, laughed at her own unfunny and irrelevant jokes, and didn't create anything wondrous or lifting inside either my heart or my head.
He has enough savings for 2-3 years, which as the majority of businesses fail within the first 2 years (with bank loans) he could easily try to start himself in his own company where there's zero risk of a lay-off (to him at least) and if he strikes lucky he'll be making far more money than he did before.

I know people with their own businesses, not even big businesses, and they pull down upwards of $500,000 a year in money they pocket. The people I know didn't start off where he did, they started off with no degrees, no college, no nothing, just a ford truck and an idea.

This guy's going to sit on his ass for the next two years until things get desperate for him and by that time the economy will be back in full swing and he'll be straight back into a job.
Well, I didn't mean to imply that we should try to impose any sort of literal rules on the community, only that all we can do is hope most of them get the point.

How are we supposed to "tell them the point"? We can't contact this jrp fellow directly and tell him to quit submitting irrelevant articles (nor would that do a whole lot of good, methinks) - our only options right now are flagging and making pointed comments on the more egregious submissions. Either those techniques work and persuade the three new readers to toe the line, or they don't. We simply don't have much control over the masses.

Personally, I think the problem could be reduced if long-time users could downvote submissions in some way (there have to be enough people who think this is a dumb article to get it off the front page, at least). After all, the number of decent comments here far outweighs the number of crappy ones, and I'd imagine that same self-moderation dynamic would hold for submissions as well.
DVD to BlackBerry Converter
iMacsoft DVD to BlackBerry Converter features converting DVD video and audio to kinds of BlackBerry. With this DVD to BlackBerry Converter, you can rip DVD to BlackBerry directly and convert DVD video and audio to suitable format for BlackBerry Bold, Curve, Storm, pearl etc.
I put Project Euler on my resume (I've completed 30% of the problems), do you consider that wise?
Depression is not a malfunction
can't they just setup robots.txt?
NYT had a story about another person suffering from Dissociative Fugue with additional detail on the condition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/americas/02iht-01mis...
Computer Chronicles - Operating Systems (1984)
I think the main problem is the lack of braces means you have to rely on white space to figure out what the hell is going on.

That's the main reason why I religiously put open and close braces on even the smallest if/else blocks as it dramatically improves the readability of the code.

If the mozilla code style specified that you have to use braces no matter what then they wouldn't be having this problem.

Of course, I'm probably arguing with hackers who prefer to use constructs like 'return (a > b ? a : b)' rather than write readable code.

This is coming from someone who likes to put spaces after and before parentheses so it makes it easier to figure out what's going on.

e.g. if ( ( y > x ) || ( x < 10 ) ) - this makes things easier to read (for me) when you start to get a hell of a lot of nesting going.
Which one line (heck, doesn't have to just be one) command would you issue to get Time Machine-like functionality from ZFS?

ZFS contains a lot of features that sound like they overlap with Time Machine, but in practice they really don't in a way that would make Time Machine a "free" feature.
Yeah, the author is mistaken. Services haven't just always been in OS X, they were even in Nextstep. Main difference in Snow Leopard is that they're also in a right-click menu now, instead of in the menu bar at the top.
I'm with Mozilla.

If I have a function with multiple conditions that cause me to return error / false / nil, I'd rather not have to nest them all in a series of if/then/else statements nor combine them into a single more-complicated if condition. I'd rather write them each as separate if-and-returns, followed by the real meat of the function.

function updatePlayers{

if (charList is empty)
return false;

if (play is paused)
return false;

if (char is frozen)
return false;

//do stuff here
return true;

}

I think this better spells out the "error" conditions.
I think you must have been reading a different piece than I read. Gruber sounded bitter, bitter, bitter to me. The last three paragraphs of Gruber's joke were pretty rancid.
Services only started appearing in OS X, it didn't exist in any version of Mac OS before then. The difference this time is that Snow Leopard gives you much more control over the Services menu, allowing you to select which ones should be active. This, together with the tighter integration with Automator, makes it very easy to create seamless workflows, either by selecting from the Services menu, using a right-click (contextual menu) or even a keyboard shortcut.

http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/learn/tut01/index.h...

http://www.macworld.com/article/142419/2009/08/snowleopardse...
Well Xanadu was a thing before the mall in Jersey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu

"It became fabled as a metaphor for opulence, most famously in the English Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan."
See also: recursion.
So much passion for free markets, yet they only exist in theory...

The U.S. is run by interest groups, unfortunately. Other countries are run by interest groups, too, but at least they have the decency not to claim their system is a capitalist one.