skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They serve different community niches, though. You seem to think that each must necessarily overlap the uses of the other so significantly that one of them has to fail for the other to succeed.

The functionality of each is so distinct from the other, for the most part, that they're more likely to develop means of benefiting from the existence of the other than to have any chance of crushing the other. In fact, since Facebook already has rudimentary Twitter-like capabilities, I'd say Facebook is more likely to be a Twitter killer than the other way around, because the main attractions of Facebook are not the Twitter-like capabilities.

. . . not that I'm particularly interested in either. For those who are, though, I can see how each has its own, separate, not necessarily competitive attraction.
If they're doing Gmail right, they are still making money off of you.
Two Java Type‐System Holes
The talk claims to be about motivation, but his main piece of evidence only points to a link with spontaneous creativity. If you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more motivated to think through the problem the night before.
I can solve Sudoku on hard at 75% of the cases at my current skill level. I am not sure that I like the idea that a piece of Lego is better than me at it...
'webinar' has been annoying me for years now.
Our team built http://pocketsapp.com. Pockets is visual voicemail for twitter. Pick a user, and we'll call you and record a voicemail. They get an @reply with a link to the voicemail (and any others left for them).

All feedback appreciated!
My weekend project: OpenShare - Ad Service for OpenSource projects Add yours 
OpenShare is a free banner exchange service targeted at Open/Free source project and blogs that want to increase their audience and climb the search rank. It works like this:<p><pre><code> * You display a banner from another project on your site
* Your banner is displayed on other opensource sites/blogs
</code></pre>
A fair and easy exchange that can help you attract more visitors, developers and improve your search rank.<p>It's running on Google App Engine using web2py.
I would be delighted if you could provide me some feedback!
I see no human element to this story. The people next to me on a flight barely count as a human relationship.
Professional tennis players and bicyclists with no interest in the technology themselves pay people to maintain Twitter accounts for them. I think that pretty much fits the definition of "majority adoption".
It would at least make sense to deal with plurals. I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for something using an s (or not) at the end, and failed to find what I was looking for, only to remember later that I should try to add or remove an s from my search term.
I'm sorry to resort to such childish forum fodder, but....

IT'S A TRAP!
This is a pretty popular hack, but cool nonetheless. Rather than reconstructing the entire optical train, it's possible to mate the scanner element to the back of a large-format camera. Check out http://golembewski.awardspace.com/index.html as an example.
This is a drawback to putting everything in the cloud: features will be weighed by the CPU cycles and storage required by the providers. Can't wait til we come full circle and get back to client/server computing ;). I'm only half joking. I actually can't wait until things mature enough so we have a hybrid of both models. Then I can decide just how much stuff I want indexed and also not worry what happens when my cable modem flakes out.
You can actually be sued for anything. Whether or not you can win is another matter, and it's difficult to recover legal costs for a frivolous lawsuit. The lawyer is probably just hoping for a settlement.
Paul, he's not traveling in the normal sense of the word. If he was visiting 43 cities in, say, 90 days, he would actualyl get to experience each city for at least 1 full day/night. And yeah, that would be cool.

But what he's doing here is just going from airport to airport, with pretty much no time to do anything except worry about catching the next flight. He's not going to get a chance to even leave the airport, save maybe once or twice. It's going to be horrible, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs a serious reality check.
Sure, but only high level developers got them. However, I was able to learn the final build number from a friend, then I just downloaded it off BT.

I have a copy on order but couldn't wait. Call it time-shifting.
.NET has had runtime-wide thread pools since its inception. Unless there's something fundamental about GCD that I'm missing, that puts Windows at least 7 years ahead of OSX on this count.
Yeah, those are great & I'm sure they will lead me to other quality sources as well. Thanks.
Thanks for the suggestion Ryan--you're right. article updated
Under No Circumstances Should You Not Focus On Building A Great Extended Team
The point is not to argue some kind of replacement of scheme for PHP. Or one language's superiority to another. The point is to show its possible to write functional, good looking PHP. Letting the "neat things" of LISP influence the way you write in other languages. Internalizing concepts that are first class in other languages by trying to adapt them to a language where they aren't first class is a great way to learn. Learning and being influenced by other's great ideas is how all languages and communities make progress. This is why Scala is such an incredible language to experience. It was shameless in its influences and its desire to merge OO and FP. Making connections between disparate languages like the layman's PHP and the academian's Scheme is exercise for the mind.
> Facebook does what Twitter does (status updates), and does it better, IMO.

Twitter actually does it better -- but, because Twitter doesn't do anything else, everything on Twitter goes into the "status update" interface, which results in severe clutter. In short, Twitter's status update functionality is better, but the social effects on it are damaging enough to make Facebook actually better suited to status updating in practice.

It's sort of an academic quibble, I guess, but sometimes those are the most fun.
> it's particularly ironic that TechCrunch, a site which sits squarely in the center of the tech PR universe, would profess to be shocked, shocked at the behavior of the people that they chat with every day.

I would use the word hypocritical rather than ironic, because (and you allude to this with your Casablanca reference) they are firmly in the know. Irony would be them gaming the blogoverse with unethical "journalism" and link-baiting then discovering that they've been gamed themselves by PR firms.
I have a serious question for the experienced Visual Studio users among you...what, exactly, is so compelling about that environment?

I've used VS only enough to dislike it; I have been genuinely surprised at how inefficient it is. For instance, I once found the GUI so awkward for changing simple project settings, that I started storing the VS project in my Unix home directory (assigned to a drive letter via remote mount), and edited the XML directly with a real Unix editor whenever I needed to change something.

Here is an article that has essentially raved about the wonders of old technology, regular expressions. (The author is probably convinced that Microsoft has done wonderful "innovations" here.) A seasoned Unix user has been able to do this kind of thing for years in "vi" and many other tools, yet I think that typing "<escape>:s/old/new/g" is a heck of a lot more efficient than any GUI's dialog box could ever be.
I'd like to mention http://give-a-box.r09.railsrumble.com/ The idea is pretty cool -- organize boxes all around the world with things to give away packaged in nice little topics of their own.
An hour, really? I don't use Outlook, so I don't know if that's right - but I suppose that's why the various Outlook search plugins are so popular.

I haven't had a problem with Gmail search as described, but I would not classify it as fast. Often I'll type in a simple query and have it spend 10-20 seconds before it returns results. If I perform the same query on the same dataset in Spotlight in Mac OS X, it starts to return results instantly with the search completing within 5-10.
Live A Better Life In Exactly 100 Ways
So your contention is that since the premise is so lame, the "joke" is that it raises awareness about what it means to actually visit a place?

In the same sense that the presumably unintentional misunderstanding of irony in the song Ironic can be spun to actually be a (supposed) clever joke about irony.
Well... Java had them (in almost every OS it ran on) since day 1 too. That puts it a couple years ahead of .NET
Caution: hi.im needs input filtering. See http://hi.im/kentbrew for insta-sploit.
Or, you could compute the average as follows:

m <-- m - (1/t) (m - x_t)

This will compute the exact historical average. I like to use 2/t instead of 1/t to get a moving average over a non-stationary distribution, which favors the more recent events.
Of course they won't. They'd love it if the rest of us gave up monetary rewards and benefits and worked hard for intangibles, and they'd get to keep theirs and most of ours.

Oh, you mean the CEOs will give up their financial incentives? I think they're laughing their collective heads off.
Google foresees profit from YouTube
Any sufficiently complicated Lisp program contains ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of the top 100 perl modules.
Hopefully the Rumble organizers drop Rails from the competition next year. At this point it no longer makes sense. If Django, PHP, or Java folks want to enter, they should be allowed. It would say a lot more for whatever language/framework the winners of the competition used.
Sure. I'm not trying to say that Windows was ahead of its time, but rather that Apple seems to be making a big deal out of a feature I'm kind of shocked they didn't already have.
I love seeing the sequence from design -> prototype.

I agree with some of the other posters though, any time you have a lot of current going through a connection that rotates / moves, you have the potential of reliability problems.

However, I don't think those are insurmountable problems, and good engineering could make this a reality.

One advantage is, if I recall correctly, UK is 220V as opposed to US 110V, so less current will be flowing through those contacts.
Editorial advice accepted -- thanks! But I'll leave the original as it is, to preserve the record for future historians. ;)
Sony Ericsson W205 Unlocked
Sony Ericsson W205 has a 1.8 inch TFT color screen with more than 65,000 colors and a resolution of 128x160 pixels. via a Memory Stick Micro (M2) be further extended so you have enough space to store many hours of music or hundreds of photos.
Best Buy considers selling vinyl records
"hipster" can be traced to African American culture and the emergence of jazz
I'd be interested in the right project. Maybe we can trade details?
It's working for me on FF3.5.2.

Incidentally, with FF3.5 you can right-click on the canvas and select "View Image". Pure win.
The difference between trying to determine events statistically and performing an empirical experiment is very important for understanding why people believe in this fallacy.

If you are physically observing a coin land heads up ten times in a row, you might expect that the mechanism for flipping the coin is so regular that it is repeating the same non-relativistic physical interaction every time.

The thought experiment fundamentally relies on people reconstructing the physical experiment in there head. If you instead described a physical experiment where the randomness was more prevalent (and the fairness of the coin was demonstrated explicitly), I think fewer people would believe the fallacy.
Are sure you are replying to the right message?

And yes. This "my language is better than yours" "debate" is completely misguided and utterly brainless. It is also endless fun to have because just about any argument can be made.

One can't start a discussion on how the Apple II was superior to the TRS-80 these days anymore or how the MSX was a soul-less machine designed by a committee. People have to find other topics to start endless passionate discussions.

All we need to do is to keep the discussion civilized, something akin to keeping our playground clean.
It's not just safety procedures either. The whole reactor designs are safer now too.
I agree that this is a neat thing that the folks who write PHP have done, good for them (no sarcasm), they've improved their impoverished language a little bit, like giving a starving kid a bicycle.

It's just hard sometimes for me to keep my mouth shut when I see articles titled "PHP as sexy as Scheme", even when rationally I know that the author probably didn't really mean that literally. To me, it's like someone saying "DOS like OS X, now with 32-bit graphics!"
If that's what he's really saying, I think he's also saying ". . . and this is a good thing!"

I'm not so sure that's what he's actually saying, though.
Unfortunately try illustrates the exact problem with open classes so many non-Rubyists are afraid of: collisions.

try was originally defined as:

class Object
def try(method)
send method if respond_to? method
end
end

In Rails it is defined as:

class Object
alias_method :try, :__send__
end

class NilClass
def try(*args)
nil
end
end

The following code will exhibit different behavior depending on which version of try you're using:

[].try :upcase

For example:

# original try
>> [].try :upcase
=> nil

# rails try
>> [].try :upcase
NoMethodError: undefined method `upcase' for []:Array

If Rails uses try internally, and a Rails plugin you've loaded depends on the original version of try, what now? They both behave differently and, presumably, code using them depends on their specific behavior.

Also don't forget the dozen or so other versions of try people have added to their own plugins and apps...
You can still do a Y combinator in JavaScript. In http://www.mail-archive.com/boston-pm@mail.pm.org/msg02716.h... I not only show how to do it, but I show one way that someone reasonably could come up with the construct.

But I agree with you that Y combinators are not generally a good approach for working programmers because there are clearer ways of accomplishing the same thing. However I've heard that in some functional languages they can be very useful as a pattern to compile language constructs to.
Sure, drop me a line at icey@icey.net and we'll talk!

[Edit: Also, even if you're just interested in working on _anything_, post in here - I know this comes up with some frequency, so someone else may find the information useful]
I would prefer if such approach was taken to ease a gradual reimplementation.

The risk of this just making the codebase even uglier is enormous.
Porn and Mirror Neurons
I don't think it has the standard library of Ruby 1.9.1
Look, stackoverflow.com does have a job session. You really might want to post there. Also, I do know some designers, at least 3, but they all suffer from the innate problem of being Brazilians since I am Brazilian myself. I don't think they would be willing to move to USA to work for you.
I am a bit puzzled but I suppose there is some solid logic behind this guideline. I'll edit the title.
The Physics arXiv Blog
For those interested in mirror neurons, Dr. Ginger Campbell (of the very good 'brain science podcast') had an episode dedicated to them: http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/2008/06/39-arbib/
The difference is that Mac OS X tends to get faster with newer versions. Apparently Snow Leopard even takes up less disk space. Not the case with newer versions of Windows.
There's a subtle point here that I think is important; we're not looking for someone to work for us, we're looking for someone to work with us.
Same here. I am astonished no student added something like this to BSD in the late 80s ;-)
I use the MIT license for all my projects because it's simple and sensible. I want to code and not worry about the politics. The MIT license gives me that.
Zoocasa Lists the SkyDome in fake ad - Adversting outside of the box
Oh yeah, the gap in gmail's search ability does hint at possible startup ideas to solve this problem. However I wonder why some great startups have passed on directly competing in this sphere (reMail being a good example)
Are Compensation Critics Guilty of Envy?
Is the recession bringing back the incubator model? It has in Limerick
That sounds funny, but how true is it? Let me use http://ali.as/top100/ as a list of the top Perl modules. #3 on the list is Pod::Escapes which I suspect is not implemented in very many Lisp programs at all.
Why the Federal Reserve must die
The largest studies on the subject show strong, dose-dependent benefits from endurance training, including running.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=733166
I think the point of GCD is that the concept is being brought down to the C, C++, and Objective-C layers, through the introduction of "blocks"...

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.htm...

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-pra...

I agree there's too much marketing hype surrounding GCD, but neither the CLR nor the JVM can jump through that particular hoop.
I'll quibble with your link as well. Did Yvain actually test to see whether his guessing increased his score over the semester? Or did he just 'prove' it?

Like the presumption of a fair coin in this page, his presumption is that the questions are fair. If they were trick questions, such that the seemingly improbable answer is correct more often than not, guessing based on partial knowledge may not be a benefit.

I think he's right, but I'd trust his results more than his abstract reasoning.
If lack of substring search is bad, how much worse is the fact that it sometimes doesn't even return all the results for a correct query. I use labels a lot, and I often use boolean searches to search for exactly which Venn intersection I need. A search for "in:inbox is:unread -label:Triangle" (without the quotes) in my gmail turns up messages labeled Triangle. I have similar other problems and cannot trust gmail's search.
A road trip sounds like way more fun. Even more fun: riding your bike across the country, or north to south, or some similar trip.
I believe in God and everything, but this is my rebuttal.
My greatest startup:
Will be known by everyone, make me trillions of dollars, solve world ills, and bring sheer beauty to the world.

If it doesn't exist, it isn't my greatest startup, is it? Therefore it must exist. Why do I have a day job again?
My solution was to use fetchmail, mb2md, and fgrep on my local server. Now I feel like I can almost trust the setup I have.
Concatenative languages, ftw!

[ read eval print ] loop
No, I mean you were "joking".

I'm not talking about the "experiment", I'm talking about the guy who got all uppity about you not being able to enjoy life. I was saying he should be taking your comment (somewhat) in jest.
Also
- Cars have actually been sighted in Europe, too (Although I am not sure what they are being used for)
- NYC was great, from my European perspective. Pretty & impressive at the same time

As for suburbs:
"places as comfortable and convenient as American suburbs: The houses are spacious, the cars are huge, cheap Big Box stores and chain restaurants are nearby, and (to quote South Park) there's "ample parking day or night." - none of these things seem very desirable, except maybe for the spacious houses.
FYI: I don't know if other people do this but I have a trigger for "Ask HN:" that highlights those posts. I don't, however, do the same thing for "Ask YC:". Not that you are trying to reach me specifically but I'm not sure how many still call this YC instead of HN anymore.
Obligatory link: http://paulgraham.com/index.html
I also did something like this. It's fun to port lisp constructs to Javascript.

http://foohack.com/tests/ycomb.html
Even in marketting copy, Apple's design taste is unrivaled:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

I mean seriously, how many levels of tabs are too many?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/whats-ne...
Given that the plane weighs less, and by extension uses less fuel, I'd say yes.

How much is a different question altogether.
Not everything in Ruby is a full-fledged class; for instance, you can't extend Fixnum.

[I am apparently completely wrong here].
I would second this - it has a lot of good info for C# folks.
This really is nonsense.

As one who has both lived and travelled in both Europe and America, I have to say, this guy is talking out of his ass. It's true that "Europeans can learn a lot more about the American psyche with a visit to a random CostCo than a visit to the Guggenheim," but this hardly backs up his thesis that America is a "better place to live."
Is there not some office that at least validates the merits of the suit though? Otherwise, the legal system can pretty much be used as a tool for extortion no?

(I'm Canadian here, so excuse my ignorance)
Do people really have an expectation of a right to privacy when posting things to the biggest and most public of forums known to man?

Bizarre.
That doesn't even mention running or endurance training. It's about fit vs non-fit people, which isn't relevant. I'm talking about a fit person who runs a couple 60s 400s and goes home vs a fit person who heads out to run three miles.

There are two points here. 1) There is a lot of evidence that marathon type running is BAD for you. Not running period, just heavy long distance running. 2) Strength training and sprints have better health benefits, with the added bonus they take a small fraction of the time of distance running.
How to Live a Better Life with Less
I like the book "Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#" - it has a lot of good tips in quick, easy-to-implement-in-36-hours-or-less format. ISBN: 0321245660
I got burned by this the first time when I was doing a consulting contract (one of my first and doing it solo) with Major Defense Contractor R, where for the first time we were trying to load some arabic data into our system... I remember sitting there and walking from file to servlet to flex setting character encodings while handwaving about installation tasks and rebuiling the system...
You're making the assumptions that every security flaw fixed was:

(a) intentionally, knowingly fixed

(b) disclosed.
I hope they begin to reconsider their model of giving multi-million dollar bonuses and 'guaranteed bonuses.' The TED speaker pointed out that when incentivized, workers' range of thought focused rather than thinking about the big picture.

A great deal of the current meltdown was caused by focusing on the immediate task of making the day's trades, but missing the looming crisis of fundamentals. Some called this, "picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer."
Historically there has been a backlash on HN for .NET. The HN community tends to be less so than reddit but still has a preference for non-MSFT languages.
Has anybody here looked into the health effects of spending 30 days in a low air pressure environment? Even flight attendants don't spend this much time on a plane.
Wouldn't put it in quite such crude terms, but you're right. The free software movement would get a lot more respect if its chief proponent wasn't Stallman.
Perhaps ironically, I agree that Microsoft had some good keyboards and pointing devices -- but that was about ten years ago. Since then, they've trended downward in quality. I'm not so impressed in even the mice and keyboards these days.

Since we don't know what questions they asked Google -- all we know is some of the response -- I'm hesitant to just go with the assumption that Google refuses to answer the posed questions.