skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The garbage strike was nice this year, you could see the dumps from just about every train going through the city. I'm glad I live outside of Toronto where our garbage collectors have the common decency to actually do their jobs through the summer, I'm fine with striking in the winter when the garbage will freeze though.

The whole GTA is a nice area, it goes from purely rural to purely urban in an area small enough to travel for everything.

The weather can be great, right now its being torturous. Lots of thunderstorms, rain and with humidity every temperature is +10 in the shade. God forbid you work outside in the sun, then it feels like +20. I'm amazed people don't just drop dead from the heat, but then I grew up in Northern England where temperatures (with humidity) rarely break 20C in the summer.

Winter is much more tolerable than summer, but that's because it's easier to wear 3 layers of clothes than it is to wear -2 layers of clothes. Personally I enjoy all year more than I did back in the UK, but that's probably because there is actually seasons here and not the 2 weeks of winter and 2 weeks of summer of my childhood.
What a coincidence. I live exactly in Romano. I'll be back to university in october. If you'd like to go out for a spritz in that period, you may contact me: stefano.dissegna [at] gmail.
I apologize for that - at the time I misunderstood Mercurial internals. It confused me that Hg does store all it's files this way - and importantly it stores its file revisions under the file name, so renames have to be tracked explicitly to find the history of the file properly, which isn't the case with Git. I was focused on that - content vs file tracking.

However, you are right, Mercurial is fundamentally a DAG based system and I didn't know that at the time and nobody I had talked to about this knew either. To be fair, just a few months ago a Googler made the inverse mistake about Git when talking about Hg at Google IO, so I'm not alone. :)
Just because someone can process fast does not mean they process correctly, and the latter is the most important quality.

Yes, this is the emerging consensus in psychological research, informed by many interesting experiments in cognitive science and behavioral economics.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1
You should get together with this guy!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752544
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
Crawl, walk, run. Everything takes time. Bonus points for reaching out for help; it's an important step that a lot of people don't take advantage of.

It's easy to see some of the cool apps and want to jump from Hello World to a production system, but programming, to me, has always been about incremental improvement and refinement. If you're having problems with more complex parts, try doing some research into what other people have contributed to the problem domain. Also, things like Yahoo pipes and other tools can help take some of the boilerplate burden off.

If you want it, keep at it. You'll learn a lot, probably make some new friends, and the community will be better for it. Best of luck.
In this case, though, I think the press are right. What really matters is what people do with the software, not what happens underneath. It's our job as nerds to get it from a communications protocol to a community.
I am from Vinkovci, Crotia, living in Montreal, Canada
isn't Hacker News a social network for us?
Just to be clear, this slideshow was done at RailsConf 08, about a year and a half ago. Although all the internals stuff is still relevant, the 150 commands thing is no longer an issue. The only binary in your path since 1.6 is 'git', not 'git-branch', 'git-ls-tree', etc. So the slides where I'm talking about being confusing with all the commands is not relevant anymore.
Multiple people in the same city seem to be overlaid on top of each other, so that you can only see one of them.
Guadalajara, Mexico
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."

-Eleanor Roosevelt

There's certainly too much discussing people lately...
they have some nice charts of various traits.

I suppose you are referring to Figure 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twin-concordances.jpg

in the Wikipedia article you kindly linked. What that chart shows, of course, is that twins can be quite DISCORDANT in a variety of socially important traits, even though they share a common genome. That should alert us to the fact that more than genes matter in human development. (Pretty nearly everyone agrees that genes matter for something, but the issue is how much expression of genes can be influenced by nongenetic influences on human development.)
That assumes inflation will more than double its current rate of roughly 3% to around 6.5%. That's not impossible, (especially with the way the current administration is spending money) but it would represent a major change of events from the current environment.
You're thinking of it in terms of the application, not the display. The app was running on the app server, which connects to the X server as an X client.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753003
1. Those who naturally meet a standard, and

2. Those who require 500,000 dollars worth of state intervention to meet the same standard.

What is your proposal for determining which group a person belongs to, if we accept the existence of two such disparate groups?

How would your proposal take into account such known facts (from psychometric psychology) as

1) error in estimation in IQ testing,

2) individual variability in IQ over the course of childhood,

3) the influence of personal drive and motivation (acknowledged by ALL psychologists) in the expression of IQ as academic achievement,

4) the known malleability of IQ under less expensive interventions in some experimental studies of individuals and across whole societies over recent generations?
220 Billion Lines of COBOL? BS
Berkeley, CA
The third shelf up on the right looks like SF paperbacks. I'm pretty sure that's Ender's game third from the right.
I guess what I was getting at is that real next gen style uses the JVM, not Java.

Down with Java, long live the JVM
I suppose somebody has to say it: No, I don't actively contribute to open source projects. No time, really.
"Right now we're in the early adopter phase, with startups and ISVs using Clojure as a secret weapon and power tool."

Are any YC start-ups using Clojure?
It could be worthwhile if this proposal were implemented:

http://docs.google.com/Doc.aspx?id=k73_1ggr36h

"Here is the same code rewritten using the proposed syntax:"

List<String> ls = ... ;
Collections.sort(ls,
Comparator<String>(String s1, String s2){ return s1.length() - s2.length(); });

By making anonymous inner class declaration more concise, you get many of the benefits of closures, without changing Java semantics.
The proliferation of classes should be manageable if you package them neatly.
The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee
Thanks for the invite, I'll see about passing by. I'm more of a hacker than a business person, FWIW.
Great image of a couple of the bridges:

http://bit.ly/6nvJ7
Why not just post some of your ideas here?
I program extensively in C++, not Java. I'm in the habit of using the const qualifier wherever appropriate - even if it's a local variable. It's an easy way to tell myself, others and the compiler that what I'm declaring isn't actually a variable, but a named value.

I don't see how using a const or final qualifier where appropriate increases bloat.
Zagreb, Croatia

Pozdrav svima :)
Www.opengood.info
Thanks for all of the feedback everyone.

@mahmud: I agree that it shouldn't be used for business logic or security.

@quizbiz: I think you're looking for some sort of proxy. Maybe more like Tor.

I was thinking of using it as a private URL that I could send to my a friend. They'd be able to see what I was sending them, but nobody else could. If someone intercepted the message, at least my friend would know about it.
I would recommend that you switch to ruby or python, then start going to the local users groups for whichever one you switched to. Stick around for the chatting/beers/etc. afterwards and network. Bring up your ideas with hackers that you hit it off with. If one of them bites, then by working together they'll make you a better hacker and you'll make them a better businessperson.

If you're looking to do this relatively soon, then I'd recommend picking one area of development, such as HTML/CSS and focusing more effort on that so that you can contribute effectively to building the project when it's just the 2 or 3 of you.
I couldn't find a list of providers that support CSMS. That certainly kills any need to limit things to 140.
In the meantime, if Java teams start implementing these practices, and more Java developers get comfortable with them, making the leap to Clojure, Scala, etc. won't be such a shock. Those languages will just require less boiler plate to write the kinds of programs they are already writing.
My verdict on the Scala language
Huntington, WV, USA
For 1997 I can believe it - thanks for the info!
Greenfield.
I'm curious, why was this voted down?
In these cases, founders should never start paying themselves. As a startup entrepreneur, one must sacrifice for the financial health of their new business. If the company is in well enough financial health, then it is ok for founders to pay themselves a salary. But never if the company's revenues are not enough to cover their pay. When you go into working on a startup, you should understand that there are many times when it is in the best interests of the new company, to reinvest revenues into the company. In the long-term this will create a substantially greater payout for the founders later. The reward does not always come quickly. But with patience and hard work, when it does come, it will be much greater. Founders whom understand this, and are not looking to get paid too quickly, are the ones that are truly invested in the project for the long run, and want to see it through to being a success, as it is their creation and their baby. Not getting a payout in the beginning, for the purpose of improving the business for the later, will ultimately increase the founder's work ethic and dedication to the company. I am a creative thinker, and MBA, and have started a startup called www.bidrealm.net, and am working on another. For both of these sites, it was never in my mind to begin to receive a salary up front. I created bidrealm.net with no investors, and no debt, and have never taken a salary because I want the business to be 10% financially sound before that happens. The last thing that I want to do, is to take a salary, have my business not meet its goals, or even loose money or go out o business, and then after the fact I crunch the numbers and realize that if I had not taken a salary, that money would have either saved the company, or even continued to make it profitable and a success. What a terrible way to go out.
Cyber attack is meant to bury blogger; instead, it makes him a star
I LOVE it. I've been thinking of and meaning to make something like this for ages - thanks for doing it for us! Now, get out of my head. :D
São Paulo, Brazil
Oh, my bad, I should have realized that, when you called out failing to capture the technical difference between rasterization and half-toning in a whimsical name for a service used to make dorm room posters by saying it was the same thing as describing a carwash as a magical engine conversion machine, we had entered the realm of literal equivalency.
Nice list. But come on, give it a spin. I mean we have http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki/wiki?AgileManifesto which is pretty extensive. What does this one add? Less terms, and perhaps a bit easier to read. But in these days we have WIKI's lets put them to use, or put them to even better use... This list isn't going to do the trick I'm afraid.
The Myth of an Ever-Expanding Entrepreneurial Youth
4iP Invests in jlees's FestBuzz
from what i remember, twitter used to allow >140 character message updates through their website, and just truncated them to 140 when sending them to sms users.
This assumes that people won't carpool, that people will keep driving their car filled with 1.2 people into downtown/midtown. All you need is a congestion tax, and lots more people will drive only up to (say) Newark to take the Path train in, or Jamaica to take the subway/LIRR in. And that's not even counting the throngs of people living in Hell's Kitchen / Chelsea / Kips Bay / Stuy Town / the Village / the LES / Battery Park City, who live and work in the CBD.
swoops in to save trim's link structure, is more like it.

but, its a smart move. it helps to validate bitly, both in what its doing and as the leader of its space. makes link redirection seem like it could be more stable.
Dublin, Ireland.
I like the idea but it seems like it has not been worked on in over a year, and then another year before that. This could be a really useful tool for organizing meetups.

If someone out there associated with this project is listening: I should be able to move my location in the event I move or made an error entering it. I should also be able to update my HN name should something happen to it. When logged in, auto-zoom the map to my location.
The title mislead me. I thought he was going to argue that Google Wave is like X-Windows. He seems to be saying Google Wave can be used as the transport layer for a display service. There does not appear to be any reason why it can't be X11 on top of Google Wave other than the insane latency requirement.

EDIT: He seems to be more keen on replacing X11. I think a protocol which works with X would be better.
Why not build a market where startups can trade computing resources... Since not every startup wants to host their sites/services on someone else's cloud, why not create a market where they can trade computing services? Later, you can add an option for trading money for computer time/storage. Call it CloudMart or something like that.
I don't use Twitter. Would it automatically shorten http://zeldman.com/?p=2233 ? Does it just shorten all links, or just ones that need to be shortened?

I'm assuming all, since non-shortened links can't be "monetized". (Feh.)
yes, i'm an openbsd developer (though not contributing much these days).

i've contributed patches to a number of other small projects that i don't keep track of.
Powering a Sustainable Future; Cleantech at Startup Saturday Bangalore
Get software, help my wedding
If you zoom their differing locations will become apparent.
You a UK student?
Secrets of the Amazon best-seller list
+1 Also.

Hi Matt :)
Near Elkridge, MD.

Wow, it always amazes me how many people are in the DC/Bmore area. Baltimore meet anyone?
I work on GPLd code at work, but it is not distributed, so that doesn't really count.
Pie Valley :P
Salt Lake City, Utah
For such a tech-centric city, it's disappointing how little web-presence we have...
Hi there, I live in Austin and just went to New York for the first time last week, but didn't spend any time doing tech-stuff. How is the community up there? Was the transition to NYC easy for you?
Hello, Jim.
McLean, VA
San Francisco, CA
Macau, China
Whoa. My gf is from Dnepropetrovsk! I'm from Kharkov originally. Both in US now. (grew up in NY mostly) :)
Get angry: AT&T changes contract to prevent class action lawsuits
I'm thinking more in terms of the person sitting in front of the computer rather than than the app. They are the ultimate 'client' who is served by the computer in front of them. That computer (thin client) is the client of the application server and so on down the line to the database and whatever other services (servers) are called.

I can't really see a solid line of differentiation between an 'X server' and a browser. Would you call the browser an HTML/Javascript server?
Since you got the very basics down, stop just learning. Start building something Immediately.

- Design the Outline of Application from user perspective
- Pseudo code
- Just Start Coding
- Learn as you are coding

Instead of just learning random things, it's a lot faster to be building something and learning what you need to know at the very given moment. Pick a small app to build, consider it a big example, if it works, you already have a app and you've learned how to code.
Nearly crashed by browser. Perhaps limit the initial number of map items to load?
Robots to get their own operating system
It's important to remember the context of this statement. Health care reformers have been claiming that preventative care will save money, lots of money. The net of this missive is that it won't, for the mentioned reasons.

This statement doesn't say that it's a bad idea, or that it shouldn't be done, or anything like that. What the statement does explicitly say is:

"Of course, just because a preventive service adds to total spending does not mean that it is a bad investment. Experts have concluded that a large fraction of preventive care adds to spending but should be deemed “cost-effective,” meaning that it provides clinical benefits that justify those added costs."

So, not necessarily a "bad thing". Just not something that can be honestly scored as saving money. Further conclusions are still up to you.

Please note that I am not commenting on the truthfulness or accuracy of this statement at this time, just clarifying the original message, to the best of my ability in my capacity as "someone who did not write it". Understanding what people are actually saying without politicized distortion (for whatever reason) is a necessary, but not sufficient, step to understanding the relevant issues.
Toronto isn't the safest, compared to other big cities it's certainly very good, but considering the commuter regions have crime rates well below the national average it's certainly better than the other big cities.

The GTA is an amazing place to live. I'm in Halton (which has the lowest crime rate for all the GTA) and crime just isn't considered where I live. I believe the biggest crime in my area is car break-ins in the Cineplex parking lot, which now has a squad car permanently parked there every night.

Considering you can have a job in either Toronto or Hamilton and have a crime rate 1/3 the national average, or a violent crime rate of 1/10th the national average, I'd say Halton is the perfect place for anyone with kids.
Since there are so many Dutchies here, a meeting in Utrecht would be cool (since Utrecht is reasonably central).

Any Utrechters have any suggestions?
Yeah, I've wanted this for a while, though not for android.
I didn't have plans for $20 million, ephemeral or real. I didn't have a number at all. But I think that's symptomatic of the problem. The problem seems to lie in the "suspension of reality" that exists for many entrepreneurial endeavors. I wasn't "in it for the money" when I started. I was trying to "change the world". I hadn't finished changing the world yet, so a buyout was only money to me. The correction of course, is to understand that your business is for the purpose of making money first and other things second. But its hard for most inventors to get motivated and work so hard for money. Its much easier to do it for a grander purpose. The problem is this "suspension of reality" bubble is hard to break once you've made it past the initial successes.

Do I have regrets? A little, but not overwhelmingly so. I have plenty in life to be thankful for. I put the lost money in the category of "yet another multi-million-dollar-MBA" I've earned ;).
Although I fully recommend learning a bit of programming, it sounds that it's not fastest way for you to build quality service.

I think you have pretty good changes to find an okay programmer, if

a) you can bring more than just the idea to the table. There are tons of people with "ideas", but if you have something else in addition: existing customer contacts, excellent graphic design skills or proven sales or marketing skills, you are bringing something valuable to the table.

b) you are able to reduce the scope of the initial product enough so that it can be done in a few weekends. Skilled guys already have their projects. If your initial project is small enough, you have much higher changes to get someone good as your partner.

c) you pay something upfront. It doesn't have to be market-level price, even a small amount is good if you are also sharing revenues with your partner. It just shows that you are committed.

The hard part is spotting a good enough programmer, otherwise you end up with someone that is just building crap. And this is the area where learning a bit of programming and hanging around on programmer forums can help a lot.
Ask HN: Why don't operating systems gzip their startup files?
I was pondering why modern operating systems take so long to start up... We have a huge amount of processing power on each machine after all, and we should be able to process all the required start up routines thousands of times faster than just a few years ago. I realize that the slowest part of modern computers are the hard drives (about 90 Mb/s is high for non-SSD) and not to mention seek times.

Which leads me to the question: why not GZIP all the required startup files? In fact, why not TAR them too, and make them sequential? Our modern CPUs would be more than powerful enough to handle the decoding process. Is there something preventing this compression? Or are they doing this already?
12 Famous Places from the history of technology
Making Chroma-Hash Less Leaky
Even if you assume 4 people per car, cars still wouldn't work as well as the subway does for moving people. The original post is an interesting perspective on how important the subways are to NYC, nothing more.

Interesting mildly off-topic side-note (gathered from 'The World Without Us'): if the systems responsible for actively pumping water from the subway system were to shut down, the subways would be flooded in about 2-3 days (since they're well below the water table of the surrounding Hudson and East Rivers).

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/did_you_know.html
Ask HN: Unshortening links
I've seen a ton of articles in recent months about URL shorten services (and the dangers associated with using them). I'm curious to know why HN'ers aren't simply "un-shortening" URL's on any sites they control. If you are parsing URL's in your site's code and you maintain a reasonably definitive list of shortening services, why not write a little script that follows the shortened link to see where it really points and replace the shortened URL with the real link?

Including such a feature in your website would also go a small way towards preventing users from posting shortened links (assumed innocent) to known malware-infested sites, if you run something like a blog that allows comments.
U.S. Corporate Tax Rate Is 2nd Highest in Industrialized World
\o/

Forthcoming and potentially of interest to HN-ers: A blog post about what to do when your competitors get techcrunched on the day you were meant to be.

(Answer: Panic.)
State College, PA
Get invites to LogMyTask, a collaboration-friendly time tracking tool
LogMyTask, a collaboration-friendly time-tracking web app, launches into closed beta today. And here is the exclusive invitation code.
Rotterdam, home of many a gabba track. Man, I miss that kind of music.
Presentation Patterns Wiki