skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my C programming days, I used FSMs heavily. They enabled me to write code to handle extremely tricky, bug-prone problems of various kinds. I wrote them as static data with a tiny interpreter. They took almost no memory, they were super-fast, and they almost always worked the first time. I can't say that FSMs are particularly readable, but they were definitely more readable than tangles of while loops and if statements.

It's always been a disappointment that FSMs work so badly in most high-level languages. They are indeed a good fit to microprocessors.
Pointers to the C libraries, please! (beyond GNU Getdate, which doesn't really do this.)
I can see that as an improvement. Thanks for the follow up.
I have tried to use Vim a few weeks back. It works great. I have the minibuffexplorer and NERDTree installed. So it was basically like an IDE for me.

BUT everything goes downhill when the "window" arrangements are messed up. I am like, WTF did this open in the upper window. HTF do I move this "window/screen" from A to B. When this happens, I restart Vim and then open the files again. Really annoying. I wonder how expert Vim users go about this issue? Any tips?
Yakuake. Man, I <3 that so much. Being able to Meta+~ and just have a terminal window right freaking there? Heaven.

Plus, I set up a few hotkeys SHIFT+LEFT/RIGHT to move between sessions. SHIFT+DOWN/UP for create/close session. Makes it very easy to do things.
rxvt-unicode with its Perl API [1] and rather amazing list of Perl extensions [2] on Linux OSes, puttycyg on Cygwin. (I recommend puttycyg if you've been using rxvt on Cygwin. Being able to type Unicode characters is an amazingly exhilarating experience, especially if you're lonely.)

[1]: http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/src/urx...

[2]: http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html
For this idea, "little" effort would really be a stretch... I agree with your overall sentiment though. What I really like about this idea is the fact that most roads are free from shadows (especially highways), and they're by definition near people.
A few notes from someone (me) who competed:

* Extremely well run. zapnap, if you're ever in Perth, I'll buy you a steak. awesome job guys.

* There's a comment about the longevity of the entries here. Can't speak for others, but I entered just for fun and for the experience. I built something quick and simple that I planned to throw away, however...

* The quality of the feedback was fantastic. The criticism my app received was very constructive (and justified :), but there was also some very positive feedback, enough that I'm going to take what I've created, keep working on it and keep it going.

I entered as a solo entrant, and my app was pretty simple but there's so much I learnt; for example, setting up a server. I've never done this before (always had someone else to do it for me), but I've had to learn how to get everything up and running from nothing. Too me a stupidly long time to do, but I had a great time doing it.
People who program their entire lifes in high level languages may not need any of this stuff. For example

* SQL
* Lisp
* Haskell
* Python
* (I ran out, but please feel free to continue)
iTerm, on tiger.
VIM is awesome, spectacular even, but if you're on a Mac, you just simply have to use Textmate. It's really just an amazing piece of software.

Who else here is totally stoked about the free 2.0 update?
How I used a css framework to create my wordpress themes
Regarding medical innovation.

Other fields also threaten people's lives. If you build a new kind of jet engine, which gets through testing but which then is responsible for a spectacular crash, then your product has killed a few hundred people. And yet, unless there was fraud in the documentation of the tests, there have not been criminal cases in the past. I worry that in the future there will be criminal cases. Again, the trend that I worry about is that what used to have been treated as a civil matter will, in the future, be treated as a criminal matter. We do not need to focus on the medical field. Many other fields can cause people to die - industrial automation, the transport and disposal of toxic chemicals, the construction of buildings (which could then fail and kill people). All industries are in need of innovation all of the time, yet innovation brings with it risk, including the risk of death. How much innovation will we get if we make these matters criminal?

I should emphasize, just in case people forget, that fraud has always been criminal. It has been criminal for centuries. So the move to criminalize more aspects of business is not a move to make fraud criminal. If you think that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act made fraud criminal, then you are mistaken. Fraud has always been criminal.

Sarbanes-Oxley is representative of the new trend. The overall goal was to encourage greater accuracy in the reporting of a company's financial health. This goal could have been reached through a variety of methods, including both the carrot (rewards) and the stick (punishments). Rewards could have included tax breaks for meeting some additional level of compliance. Punishments could have included fines levied against companies that failed to meet a higher level of compliance. These approaches would not have raised the risk of jail time for CEO's. Instead, Sarbanes-Oxley decided to go with the heaviest kind of punishment of all - to treat infractions as criminal offenses, potentially meriting jail time.

This punitive attitude is going to have a chilling effect on the amount of innovation we can expect in any field.
yeah, it's funny, because you only see the people who didn't go out of their way to make funny things for the flyover.
> * They won't get a flat in a decent neighbourhood, they will have a hard time finding a job.*

Not to derail this, but just "I was convicted of a crime and did jail time" is enough to get this sort of treatment. Regardless of the crime.
Reminds me of an old chinese proverb:

"My neighbor came to my workplace to tell me my house was on fire. But I hate my neighbor, and chose to ignore him. When I got home, my house was no more. "
:-O A super model hacker? "Juliana Grigorova" on the member's page:

http://www.meetup.com/speed-dating-for-hackers/members/
I used to use Terminal, but switched to iTerm for a single feature (useful labels on tabs).
It's actually been halved to -4 now.
The best way to start with Vim is the included 'vimtutor' command, which opens up a document that guides you through basic editing operations (on itself).

After that, being around other Vim users (in person, on the vim-users mailing list, or subscribing to the !vim group on identi.ca, etc.) is best - being able to ask someone "Is there a better way to do X?" or have someone watching over your shoulder say "I can't believe you're doing that the slow way!" is a great way to learn.

The best long-term solution, I've found, is to remember that laziness is one of the great Programmer Virtues, and pay attention whenever some editing task gets tedious, and take a moment to look for a solution in the (amazing complete and well-indexed) Vim online help (":help") and perhaps the Vim Tips site (http://vim.wikia.com/)
Wow, I had no idea about the Win-Arrow window resizing thing. Thanks for mentioning it.
Gnome Terminal because of its text smoothing (and because it adheres to a set of human interface guidelines).
Title should be "theremin for sale: $50, (comes with free cd)"
WebMynd - A better way to search: Complementos para Firefox
I'm using 2.1 on 10.6...I think it's about the same as 2.0.
On Speech Recognition: Pointers for Newbies & Lessons from a failed startup
Can someone explain to me how it is that club promoters work? Back when I was living in LA, I'd meet lots of people who would tell me they're a promoter for club X, but I never understood how they fit into the business model.
This seriously could not have come at a better time. I'm in LA and just started getting into the community. There are some hack labs around the city as well, but nothing specifically like this that I'm aware of. Massive props to steveeq1 for the link.
Nah. You can run IRC on emacs too!
You can split windows, but otherwise pretty much the same, yes.
Try out iTerm sometime. Much, much faster and lighter than Terminal.app. I switched to iTerm when Terminal.app crashed while compiling Haiku ... twice. The problem, I believe, was the large amount of compiler output.
More discussion about this idiom, this time discussing Ruby 1.9's #tap method:

http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/posts/gregory/011-tap-that...
You can also do this with Terminal.app on OS X with this: http://visor.binaryage.com/
Sorry, I rarely downvote, but I couldn't disagree more. Someone is taking their music and making something freaking awesome out of it. This isn't just another album that's physical embodiment is the same process that's been used on every other album. It's something different. Work went into it. Passion went into. This is the difference creating StackOverflow and throwing up a phpbb and calling it a question and answers site for programmers.
rxvt-unicode also has some of the best (most accurate, most complete) terminal emulation out there, second only to xterm. Daemon mode is also a neat trick if you're running on a limited-memory system.
I respect your thought, but my intent was not to throw a random incendiary statement out there. I am saying that this is not "a new way to market music" because it is not a scalable model. It is one man who (albeit with a lot of smart effort and innovation) is selling a packaged instrument so that you will also receive his music.

It's not like interesting album art that comes with his CD, it is actually unclear which one is the draw? Actually it is clear since it's priced at $50, it's the theremin.

I'm more commenting on calling this "a new way to market physical music". I too think his theremin is "freakin awesome."
Find other people in school who enjoy learning, and you need not be frowned upon. In my experience, anyway.
This is really excellent. The title is, as mentioned, horrible, but the content is great. Language designers would do well to keep this stuff in mind. Almost all software projects would do well to keep better in mind the stuff about ease of installability.
I used iTerm before Leopard, but it crashed at least once a week, and sometimes it would just forget settings, and it used up an insane amount of resources if you left it open for a few days (and shutting down all my ssh sessions and restarting them is not my idea of a good time, nor is trying to figure out where I put this server or that server in the tab list; I like them to stay at the same position so I don't have to consciously think about that).

When Leopard came out, it had a Terminal.app that fixed essentially all my issues with the previous Terminal.app, including having tabs, etc, and it hardly uses any resources at all, and stays open without crashing for weeks at a time (in fact, I don't think I've ever managed to crash it). Now that there's a copy-on-select plugin for SIMBL for Terminal.app, it's just about perfect.
First problem: vim has already implemented any feature you can imagine, with more refinements and related features than you can imagine. But you have to imagine it before you can find it...

Second problem: And even then, you can't find it in the help (it's organized like a professional index - like that of a legal textbook - you have to know what you're looking for before you can find it). Google solves this problem.

Google also helps solve the first problem, of "what to search for": you search by describing the difficulty or problem you have.
A brilliant resource for this is Stackoverflow. It's works well for developer-centered, technical questions.
The internet is the vim help: "a user generated FAQ". But this is just a way to cope with poor discoverability - the real answer is to design the interface to be discoverable.
Guake, which provides a Quake like terminal and quick and easy access to a terminal using the F12 key. Plus, it supports anti-aliased fonts and multiple tabs.
http://trac.guake-terminal.org/

On my Mac at work I use Visor.
http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor
I don't know how you intended it, but something about the statement that this is "not a new way to market music because it is not a scalable model" just terrifies me. Heaven help us when creativity becomes a negative thing in music.
I have severe doubts that musicians can profit from getting out of the music business and going into the poster business.

"Hey guys, I've got this great plan -- let's go into an IP-based commodity business which can be traded across the Internet losslessly and perfectly duplicated for negligible cost."
:h windows

I prefer using tabs with Vim. Here's a short overview:

* :tabnew to open a new tab.

* :tabe <FILENAME> to edit a file in a new tab.

* :q or :close to close a tab.

* :tabnext and :tabprevious to move between tabs.

* Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown are bound to :tabnext and :tabprevious. On my MacBook, I bind those to Cmd+[ and Cmd+].

* And, of course, :h tabs to find help.
Clearly freemium has success cases. But I honestly am hesitant to commit to this advice myself.

The kind of people one attracts with "free" are people that want stuff for free. Are these customers really the best use of your resources?

My friend constantly tells me to open-source my project, "free attracts, free attracts" he says.

Attracts what? People that are willing to spend vast amounts of time and effort to get out of paying a company like 37 signals to just "get it done".

Obviously there are profitable fremium models, but don't you think its an uphill battle? Do I really want to process 1million customers, so that 1,000 actually pay?

As you might expect, I am a DHH fan. I just thought I'd open the discussion on the side of being wary to committing to free.
wont this break analytics services?
it's hard to take James Murdoch serious when he talks about free makets... considering the fact that his career is the result of who his father is and not own achievements.
FWIW I reason there are many more unprofitable freemium startups than profitable; just have not been around long enough to exhaust all their funding.
They likely picked Sampa because its cooler to say "ex Microsoft employees tried and failed", and because they don't read HN.
you can check out these links http://www.moolenaar.net/habits.html, http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html, http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html. I loved vim after reading these articles.
Using MySQL and WordPress for the startup? Not necessarily :)
Yep, that was me. In case anyone's wondering what the difference is, theremins don't use light sensors (or whatever the technical term is; I'm CS, not EE) but something that detects proxmity.
I agree there's probably a lot of blame to bare on the education system. Packing 700+ students into a school with barely 30 adults (including janitors) isn't a realistic representation of society. There's barely 1 child per adult in the western world, but our education system gives 30 or more children to a single adult that hasn't even had a child of their own.

How can you expect to raise 30 kids when you haven't even raised 1. It's ludicrous.
I used Aquamacs for 2-3 years but never really learned emacs until I swapped Aquamacs for Carbon Emacs and learned the real thing. Training wheels is a good analogy. You aren't really riding a bike if you use training wheels and they slow your progress in actually learning. Sure you can get to your friend's house, but you look like a dork.

I found the Emacs Starter Kit (http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master) and the Meet Emacs Peepcode Screencast (http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs) to be awesome. After a couple hours of working through the screencast, I was a 5x better Emacs user than I had been after 2+ years of Aquamacs use. You have to "get" Emacs and Aquamacs doesn't force you to do that. The $9 for the Peepcode screencast was the best money I've spent in a long time.
I prefer Terminal.app, mostly because it uses the OS native keys for copy/paste (cmd-c, cmd-v). On windows I use putty which has keyboard paste on Shift-Insert. On linux I use gnome-terminal which has keyboard copy/paste on Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V. (I should stop using all three of these operating systems... :)
Flip side: HN apparently expects that Apple should have enough people on staff to provide timely, professional support to developers whose apps might never sell as many as a hundred copies total.
I think the highlight of the article was the usage of the word "Gickeleshut".
I'm a Korean Holt adoptee and some of the comments following the article are quite funny to me. My parents love me as much as they would any biological child. I think that we'd like to imagine that nurture plays are larger role in what happens, but I do believe what the article is trying to say. I was adopted into a lower income family and I have an MBA from a great school and am currently in med school. My income has been (after my MBA/before I started med school) and will be quite a bit larger than my family's. They did a great job raising me, but I didn't have all "advantages" (whatever they may be) of being raised in a more affluent family. A lot of who we are is decided before we are born. However, I do believe that our parents can help us to make the most of what we are given, whether they are our biological parents or not.
With the amount of commerce at least somewhat reliant on the internet, I think it would be far more than calls for a boycott. It would be a near worldwide call for economic sanctions.

Crippling another countries economy is easily justifiable as a military attack, or at least a very prominent precursor. It will never be used, because the results would likely be dire.
so it would be better if he never left the stage but didn't produce half of the excellent material (both written and in code) that he did?

Thankfully I don't belong to 'communities' that consider things that way...
Sorry to back and forth, but you are clearly misunderstanding if you are terrified.

If someone wants to build a musical instrument: by all means, that's terrific. As a music lover and instrumentalist, I will buy it and play with it...w/e. But don't write an article telling the world you've figured out how to sell CD's, since that is NOT what you're doing.
I was thinking of the compiler doing it for me. I'm not interested in writing new code. I'm interested in porting a lot of old code. It would be best if I could get it to "just work" modulo an automated translation.
Terminator. Fuck yeah.
Http://www.saaslisting.com/
Need a service directory listing?? You need SaaS - Software as a Service Directory Listing Visit http://www.saaslisting.com/

SaaSListing.com provides an honest look and review into some of the best up and coming SaaS and Technology related websites in the world. Our focus is to offer honest, reliable and quality analysis of businesses that make a difference each and every day. List your startup saas company: Accounting, CRM, CMS, Cloud Computing, Managed Services, HR, IT and more.Delete this site from your blog? or Delete review only
You don't. Accept your failure, go out and get a job.
It's not obvious if your comment is serious or tongue in cheek.

Prior to the competition, teams can prepare as much as they like, with pretty much the only proviso being no creation of any digital artifacts. This means no code and no digital artwork can be created before the 48hrs starts, but teams are allowed to do as much non-digital (ie. pencil and paper) prep as they deem necessary.

Sure, there's room for people to cheat if they wish, but I think it's disingenuous to throw out a "i bet a lot of people cheated" comment instead of perhaps crediting them with good planning, hard work and skill.
I wish there were an easy way to use Smarty for Wordpress templates. There's something messy about PHP in the templates.
I don't understand. They don't tell us the significance of this, or enough history to care, and they end by philosophizing on the morality of space programs. This is crap reporting. The BBC is better than this.
I love the daemon (aka "client/server") operation of rxvt-unicode, and the fact that with all its capabilities it's still smaller than xterm.
I second iTerm. Its Great
Rxvt, normally on Cygwin. If I had more use for Unicode in practice, I'd use urxvt on non-Cygwin.

Also, when ssh into remote boxes, I often use screen, which effectively ends up being a pretty crappy terminal - major failure mode is loss of scrollback buffer, Ctrl-A ESC notwithstanding.
I think your added sentence in your edit helped.

In any event, this can be abstracted. The way to sell CDs isn't to make theremins... it's to not suck. It's to put passion and energy and effort and time into your projects instead of just grabbing 10 random songs, burning them onto a CD and calling it a day.
hold on.

Since February

^^ I think TC needs to rethink their headlines. unless im completely mad Bing launched at the very tail end of may :)

Additionally.

There’s also the issue of whether or not this speed increase really matters all that much

They clearly dont know a lot about search engines either ;)
Xterm. It's been there for me since 1988, and I'm certain it'll be there right up until the eschaton in 2038. It's installed on every X11 system and it's always compatible.

(It has antialiased fonts, too.)
I agree that biologists shouldn't be actively developing weapons of any kind, but its really not their job to ensure that their work isn't militarized.
It is an insane amount of work to create a product better then the paid versions, then add in extras that go above and beyond for a fee. Once you start bringing on people, you have to start working to keep them happy, while also trying to build those extra features. In a perfect world a person would have funding to do that but for most startups funding is not available. I have yet to see a funded startup pull something like that off either.
I have added these line in my .vimrc.

map th :tabnext<CR>
map tl :tabprev<CR>
map tn :tabnew<CR>
map td :tabclose<CR>
They may know search engines. Google is plenty fast for me. I would much rather see better results and have a easier time finding things than see faster results. A 100 queries to find one article I'm looking for is frustrating whether it takes 100 seconds or 200.
As real and raw as anything written by a badly bitten practitioner. If you're doing SR, don't read this article and don't bookmark it, wrecking a nice beach takes a lot of fucking effort; just contact the author and grab the guy while he is between gigs.

If I had the money I would be hiring these guys with "failed" startups and pairing them with good sales people. They haven't failed, they just don't have industry contacts :-(
I used to use aterm, but one thing drove me to change -- Unicode support. Now, I use rxvt-unicode.

Since making the move, though, I've grown to love rxvt-unicode's daemon mode and discovered that pseudo-transparency works better than it did on aterm. I mention my reasons for choosing rxvt-unicode over other terminal emulators here:

http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=451
The punitive attitude is going that way because there is no incentive or disincentive to care about innovations in any given market.

Politicans care far more about abortion and other popular issue because it give them the vote. It doesn't even matter if their policy isn't good, they will parrot it in lieu of popular opinions.

Clearly, the republic do not have any if much features that keep bad policies away and tending toward good policies. Unfortunately, it is also very painful to remove a republic or any monopolistic governemnt and start a new type of governing system. It could even have disasterous consequences if the new governing system is seriously flawed.

The market for governing is only 200ish suppliers versus 6 billions human beings. Clearly, we also going to need a better system that generate these "governing entities" so that we can speed up innovation in social paradigms that regulate human socities.