skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My friends and I call that jabber :-P
Eindhoven,the Netherlands (i actually live in Valkenswaard)
Nahariyya, Israel.
English not being my first language I may be prone to if not false then alternative interpretations, but I can't help finding the title with its connotations pretty elegant.
Manassas as well.
Don't get shot by the competition?
I think learning how to program is the way forward for several reasons.

- If nothing else you'll learn more about how it works, what can and can't be done, etc.

- It'll make you a better manager

- It shows that you have commitment.

But basically it's simply about looking at one problem at a time, seeing how you might solve it, and then moving on to the next one. It seems as if you've chosen to try and grok programming, and have made some progress, but not quite enough. That's good. If you're doing something you're doing more than most people. Now you can move on and try to find a partner or contractor, and they'll be able to see that you've actually tried. you're not just a dreamer with a million dollar idea. That'll give you some credibility.

I just wrote a blogpost about this that might be of interest to you: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/08/dreamers-and-doers.html

And hey, don't give up :-)
I've released a series of PHP scripts for personal (young) webmasters under the GPL if that counts.
"WH,OR" a.k.a. Whitford, Oregon, the happy town.
This is silly, all it's saying is that if you're humble enough to donate anon, you're going to be vilified. I'm unbiased as far as windows/mac goes, Jobs does seem very orientated to his visions only, but I refuse to believe Jobs doesn't donate to charities, and I have no information to say he does or doesn't.

My grandmother loved to donate as anon0 to people, sending large lump sums to people in need, directly in the form of cash in their mailbox or otherwise delivered as a "gift" with no "from". I hold humble charity in the highest regard, and whenever I donate, I refuse to put my name to it to this day, as a gift given for recognition feels cheapened.

we didn't find out until after her death, my mother was normally her assistant in sending and getting it to the right places and she didn't disclose any of this until after her passing, in memory of her and to honor her.
Clouds and Permanence
"Ultimately, the protocol did not catch on and was soon forgotten."

So the acronym expands to "Rest in Peace Script"?
Here's an example of what I mean. It only works in Firefox, unfortunately, but shows the concept of using raster sprites within SVG:

http://www.mattryall.net/demo/civ-svg/

SVG is by no means a solid game development platform, but it is some interesting browser-based technology which might be useful for game developers to investigate.
Granada, Spain
OpenBSD 4.6 Pre-Orders Online
I contribute to the Fedora Project's Infrastructure. Specifically the pkgdb: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb

I've also contributed extremely insignificant patches to django and turbogears.

I'm not a startup hacker though...
Reston, VA
Next-gen Java Programming Style
Calgary, Canada
Minneapolis, MN, USA
Corvallis, Oregon
Yes, I actually just contributed my first patches for Rails this weekend (I think 3 or so got committed already) during the bugmash event. I definitely plan on making more contributions too.
Sure, but what about a separate field for a URL attached to a message? Do you _have_ to have the URL in the message?
Living, for 6 months, for study
If there is any validity to the X-Windows comparison, none of those questions make any sense. Substitute and you get "I'm on X-Windows, hit me up" or "Yeah, I switched over to the X-Windows Matt's running," which no one would ever say.

I agree that the coverage so far have said exactly the kinds of things you are saying. I never understood what they were really getting at, but this article makes a lot more sense to me. It is mainly a protocol, and what the press are calling "Wave" is just a demo app that Google put together.
I just submit bugs & crashes that happen on my Ubuntu system. Otherwise, I've been trying to contribute something to open source but in vain.
Does your phone and provider not support long SMS messages? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS ).
I'd have thought there would be more of us...?
Yeah, being a leftie as well, spiral notebooks are incredibly uncomfortable, unless the spiral is on the top. Even reversing them can feel awkward.
I can't say anything about leaving the continent, but I'll definitely back Montreal as a great place to go. I lived there for 12 years and am looking forward to returning (now in Ottawa for grad school).

As was mentioned, the rents are reasonable (I've got a friend living in a 5 1/2---2 bed, living/dining/kitchen for about $550/month, and he's walking distance to downtown), there's a good tech culture (lots of speech & language related stuff, web companies, game studies, etc.), and the city itself is great---a mix of the best bits of North American and European culture...you can find stuff to do 24hrs/day no problem). Also, the girls are smokin'.

As for language issues, I know people who are born & raised in Mtl and don't speak any French (beyond "oui", "non", "bière", "poutine"). There's a street called St-Laurent that more or less divides the city into eastside/westside. If you're on the west side, you can use English with no fear. Yes, you may run into a French Québecois who's an ass and tells you off, but it's really rare (more common in the east, though).
I always thought that XWindows uses the term 'client' and 'server' correctly, while the average joe simply uses the words too loosely: they want to say that the client is "my machine right here", and the server is "that machine over there".

But, in reality, it is the display server process that offers display services to client programs that use them.
> About giving users enough rope to hang themselves: for every one user like you that could make a conscious tradeoff there are thousands who would never connect the dots between Adobe and battery life.

People are too stupid to be trusted to make decisions for themselves. That's the Apple philosophy for ya.
Or do. Dying is fabulous for record sales. Perhaps the same applies to startups.
Reminds me of that movie where the failed writer sets himself on fire to make his book sell.
Is prevention is more expensive than treating the disease?
Poll: How you're funding your startup
The two major schools of thought seem to be bootstrapping and acquiring funding. I'm curious as to how many people want to go the YC way or the 37signals direction.

I suppose it's possible to acquire seed funding and bootstrap from there, so I'll include that as a choice as well.

If people feel up to commenting, I'd like to hear about your exit strategies as well - do you plan to get huge and sell / go public, or do you prefer to build a business that you'll work for for awhile?
We intend to seek funding.
We intend to bootstrap.
Funded, but not working full time on the project.
Bootstrapping, but not working full time on the project.
Funding has been received and we are currently working full time on our project.
We are bootstrapping and working full time on our project.
Memphis, Tennessee
Just down the road from you - Rochester, NY here.
Who are you hoping talks about you?
Really good advice. Whenever I encounter Java code that employs some or more of these techniques, I feel a little bit better about the world.
Next door in lovely rural Cheshire.
Des Moines, Iowa
+1 Silicon Valley
Joe Armstrong on OO: Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.
"It essentially defines the data structures of a collaborative document editor"

Thank you!

I have not been able to make sense of the press coverage trying to describe what Google Wave is. This is immensely clarifying. Google Wave is chiefly technology for building collaborative editing applications. Casting it in terms of competing against email, IM, or Facebook, is simply a category error. I suppose the technology demo labeled "Google Wave" built on the underlying tech may be partially at fault for the confusion.
I was just thinking about BIG recently. He was 24 when he was murdered; what he achieved in his short life is just staggering.
It always felt wrong to me because the remote computer acted in response to your actions. You click on something and it responds. I'm sure there were valid technical reasons for it but commercially it must have been disaster.
I think it's funny that this is right next to the interview with Rich Hickey :)
I'm in Berlin too.
How do we set up the meeting time and place? Watching this thread is far from optimal. How about a doodle?

http://doodle.com/rb4dsfn6e2ip5xv4
I'm moving to thailand to geoarbitrage in feb/march
How to think like a designer
And who decides?

Exactly. It's always the (neo) puritans...
Yeah, disappointing isn't it? That's why I just moved to NYC last month.
Lots of COBOL still in existence.

If you use a credit/charge card, make an airline reservation, have an insurance claim adjudicated, pay a utility bill, etc.… odds are an old-school COBOL application (with a DB2 database or even more archaic IMS hierarchical system on the backend) is going to process that transaction. Sure, a snazzy web frontend might be in place now, but in the guts is buried business logic reduced and offshored staff no longer possess, and life lingers, only measured in half-life units now…

Most corporate COBOL (as this is the province of Fortune 500 firms) application support and development is handled by offshore vendors, primarily in Asian and Indian locales, with facilities here in the states to hold non-immigrant visa programmers.

COBOL knowledge (and a lot of the details are buried in the platform it runs on — in my experience, mostly IBM mainframes, though I started on Burroughs hardware) is still in a pre-internet age, and college textbooks and three ring bound together 8 1/2 by 11 pages serve as instructional aids, along with experience.

A lot of corporate outlets have engaged in boondoggles to replace the COBOL, but a good deal of these efforts have been epic fail:

* …lot less business knowledge handicaps

* …likely to whiz-bang consultant firms with their own lock-in proprietary systems that woefully underestimate effort to decompose and recompose legacy system…

* …the systems running have been optimized over the years, and they're tied to existing data center operations, which in many cases, are run by IBM. It may seem incredulous today, but even in the 90s, the mainframe systems ran circles around PC and web solutions, especially the "solutions" vendors were offering at the time.
Davis, California
San Jose, CA
I actually make it a point to not hang out with people if they don't record my drunken shenanigans for posterity.
Brisbane, Australia
If you look at the source for Clojure you'll see many (if not all) of these techniques used throughout with an additional focus on static classes and methods.
+1 I'm sure there are plenty of us Austinites here, it's just too hot to scroll this far down.
St. Louis, MO. USA
Stackoverflow in [pick a language other than English i.e Chinese]
Asturias, Spain
HackrTrackr.com
Except if someone tweets a link like http://www.zeldman.com/2009/08/10/shorten-this/, it will get shortened by a 3rd party shortener.
Dr Dre has the follow tips:

You better get a vest, then invest in something
To protect your head and neck

I don't think he was talking about kit from ThinkGeek
When Mortals Work on Cosmic Time
Finished studying the theory. Now it kind of makes more sense, thanks.

So, they created a translator to give you the initial state that would end up calculating what you need? Cool, but how can they create a universal calculator if there can't be any interaction with the system?

This is the part that seems less obvious to me. It is said to be a zero player game, right? You set it up and you see it play itself till it dies, you die, or it grows stale or you grow bored. You do not interact with it so how would you make it calculate what you need?
> Do not use loops for list operations.

I can not get behind this in Java if the filter, fold, or map operation is simply a one-off. (It's another matter entirely though if the power of the functional approach is useful in the situation, say if a filter should be switched dynamically.) To do this for something static though, such as eliminating empty strings or adding an array, is just worse than useless.

This is as clear an example as any of programming against the language, not into it. The code is longer, it is slower, and _for a Java programmer_ it is much less clear. Java was explicitly designed not to be a language for showing off cute constructs for their own sake.
I have to admit that the 5th point (Use many, many objects with many interfaces) leaves me thinking...

On the one hand I understand where the author wants to go : by implementing many many interfaces you eventually sort of "emulate" duck-typing, while at the same time reinforcing type safety (specially when it comes to String).

On the other hand, it sounds like a good way to make something that was verbose to begin with even more verbose... but maybe I'm mistaking. I don't do much Java recently (some GWT/GXT sometimes), but I will probably give it a practical try...
Alice: An Online Personal Shopping Assistant That Knows What You Need
I recently was compiling my old stories (I've written fiction since I was 7), to go in a book. Some of the stories were typed or printed in a courier font, and I either used OCR software or typed it in by hand.

Some were on a hard drive backup (from a 286 PC with Wordperfect 5.1) from 1996.

The most bizarre thing, though, was stories I'd sent to friends over email, and then lost the original files somehow. I was able to run a search and find 4 (!) stories like this, in my email archive.

Sadly, in 1999 I broke a C64 disk which contained a few little bits of stories, so in this case, the paper outlasted the magnetic.

But now I have a 794-page hardback book (acid-free paper I think) of stories to put somewhere safe.
I've done this with 20 year old C64 floppies, and most of them worked fine. There were some intermittent errors, but it's hard to say if that was the floppies or the notoriously finicky floppy drives.
Medical Transcription through Outsourcing
Medical Transcription is one of the numerous activites that have benefitted from outsourced. Medical Transcription refers to the transformation to text of prerecorded physician notes. This activity has long been carried out by transcription services allied to the hospitals. Yet, with the outburst of offshoring, there has been a reposition in the service delivery model adopted for medical transcriptioning
PBXT: Your Next MySQL Storage Engine
Not necessarily verbose, but moreso a larger codebase. Besides -- all of these extra classes are invisible with D.I. anyway right? ;)
College Park.
Work daily on, but then that is my job. :)

http://akvo.org/
I appreciate the verification mechanism - allows one to maintain security on both sides of the fence...
There's plenty of room in a startup for the programmer + business guy to be different people...I think for a company to go far they almost have to be different people. While learning something about programming may be educational to you, I doubt you're going to become the kind of cream-of-the-crop programmer you want building your technology.

If you're good at business, do what good business people do--design product, hire talent, scare up money, and bulid relationships.
91% of people believe they are healthier than the average person
me three :)
Another Austinite here. Hi adam! Didn't know you were on here :).
Should this really be solely a question of economics? That seems like a rather inhuman way to approach the issue.

I know I'd personally rather spend more and not get cancer (as long as the tests aren't so invasive and unpleasant that they drastically lower the quality of my life), for example, than wait and treat the cancer later simply because that's the cheaper route.
The Chamonix Branch Office [2006]
South Hills :)
Ciudad de México, México
Worst cubicle in the world 2009 - Week 3 finalist slideshow
Glossary of Software Engineering Terms ‎(Software Engineering Tips)‎
This seems the eternal problem for anyone wanting to break the ice and get onto the hacker wagon. I've been isolated for years trying to build up my hacker credentials, until I eventually gave up. What coding I could learn was taken from books, hacked around shoddy equipment and bounced off the wall for a few weeks, before finally getting some feedback from irc or various forums. The problem was never having a mentor, someone who could say "you know what, you suck at C, why not try something with a more robust framework" or "you're right struts is a piece of shit, but industry like these things".... unfortunately I've found that this type of thing is less than forth coming. I thought I would have found something at uni, but I didn't have the time to take part in what little I could find, so focused on things I could get support for. Now, I've returned to me hometown and isolation is very much more oppressive than I remember and I'm a little ashamed of not making more from the opportunities afforded in the city.

I don't know what to say, I love online learning, and really try to make the most of open source communities and irc, but I've always found it a bit... "Glass Bead Games"?
me three.
The Definitive Guide to htaccess Techniques: Do’s and Don’ts
> There is an existing team working on these solutions, and they say they're about 50% ready to launch.

> ... work with the developers to build a realistic set of phases and milestones in the project.

Somewhere between these two statements there's a problem.

What makes you think that they don't have a set of phases and milestones, that said phases/milestones are somehow inadequate, or that you can do significantly better right now? (I'm perfectly willing to assume that you can do better three months from now, but I'll bet that they can too.)

If they don't, you've got a huge problem. But, you haven't said anything that supports that assumption. So, why are you making it?
You're right, it will grow the codebase more than making the code verbose. And the code will probably be more readable.

But have you actually used this in practice ? Is it tractable ?

I'm actually thinking of trying this on (a rather old version of) C#, since I'm writing quite lots of code for (an old version of) mono. If only I could use F# sigh
A three-step way to identify contingencies to address in a services contract
1. You should pick up a MVC framework (Rails, is what I'd recommend). After learning something like that you can pump out your "ideas" fairly quickly as compared to simple PHP + MySQL. I'd say it's easier too, to learn from scratch, but maybe that's just me.

2. Most hackers don't respect those founders that don't throw down code. Your best bet is to be ready to get dirty and throw down.
They forgot one:

- Surfing Hacker News - Basic research.
How do you plan to make some income there?
Restraint is one of the most difficult virtues to practice, and it seems to frustrate and confuse those who don't understand its value. Adding a feature to a product is almost reflexive to most vendors; everybody is mindlessly chasing lists of checkboxes, while ignoring the inherent tradeoffs or pretending they aren't there. It amazes me how the simple act of saying 'no' can send people into such a tizzy.
Cool Trend Alert: Hating Apple Is Hip
Frisco
Reddit's initial appeal was supposed to be the recommendation engine. But for me, it never got past being a version of the front page with a different decay algorithm (even to the point that it included stuff I'd read and/or downvoted).

So this would be a little like the Yahoo/Bing deal.
Amsterdam here. I'd be interested in a meetup, but I just organized a meetup (non-HN) that went pretty horribly by most standards (people pledging to come and then bailing).

But what the heck...
+1 midtown as well
That sounds like http://whoissick.org/sickness/ with Facebook Connect.

That site has been around for awhile, and I think the biggest problem is sick people don't generally feel like going online and contributing open data projects. The geekiest among us might, but most people just want to lie on the couch and watch movies and sip ginger ale when their sick -- not get online and log their symptoms and recovery time.

What might work is getting mother's to record data about their sick children or doctors to record aggregate data about their patients. Neither of those groups will want to (or in the case of doctors are legally able to) share specific information about the people who are sick, but the data about what's going around your town could be valuable to you as a parent or as a patient (and to other doctors and the CDC).
"Refactoring is easy, should you need it. If you do not control all the code and it’s usage, you might need to be more careful though."

Bloch's Effective Java is wonderful, but if it has a weakness, it might be that it assumes everyone is writing a library to be used by a lot of developers, many of who are outside your organization.

The example of public fields in data transfer objects is an example of this. Making the fields public is fine if this code is just for you and your team, because you can always refactor it to use accessors later if you need to. But if this code is in a library used by people outside your organization, introducing accessors later without breaking code will be almost impossible.
Portland, Maine
Yep, you got it.

It's more like a programmable calculator than a real computer at the moment, but that's only a superficial difference. For instance, if you wired a switch into your computer and you set the 'life' game to initiate a glider on a switch press then you could interact with it.
In the large, yes, it needs to be an economic question, simply because there isn't enough health care to go around, and there likely never will be.

So you are left with a question of allocation and rationing (no matter if it's government or private market rationing). So you need to figure the most cost effective ways of administering health across the population. Ethics falls into this as well, but is weighed against cost. (see Britain's drug board approving end-of-life drugs that add only a few weeks to life at large expense -- NY Times had something about it)

Basically, the flaw in your argument is that there's a presumption that there is infinite supply, and it just costs money to get at, so more money thrown at the problem (ie. more tests, prevention) means more treatment. But it doesn't work that way, it's a tradeoff. The doctor testing you for cancer today is not treating somebody who actually has it today. (simplistic, yes, but you get the point).
Although I do agree that you shouldn't reassign a parameter I don't agree with using the final keyword everywhere. Any decent koder knows not to modify a parameter. If you want to enforce something like this then parse the code on check in and refuse the check in if a parameter is modified. Don't bloat the kode with a reactionary workaround.
Google greases Arrington with Google Voice number portability
I'm not sure why they decided the display should be the server and the programs be the clients. It might be because the other way around is to have one client, the display, access many servers, the programs. That seems even less right to me. (On the other hand, that would make it easier to let a friend over the network look into one of your windows.)

Commercially speaking, X11 was a great success. It is the de facto windowing system for UNIX and UNIX-like systems despite all of the horrors it brings.
Thats a Gartner Group claim from 1997. I wonder what would the share be now according to them.