skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the web, pretty much anybody learning a language like PHP or ASP or whatever can basically do some copy-and-paste programming and have something up on the web ready for public consumption before they have even finished figuring out how programming works.

That was the route I took, and thankfully I was sufficiently chastised by better programmers for unleashing stupid, insecure PHP software that I became more cautious.
> A BMW motorcycle and an Apple computer will typically outlast 2-3 of the average competitor's products, while costing about 1.5x as much.

Wait, what?

For me it's hard to think of a company with more disposable products than Apple's.

"Oh, you have an OLD generation iPod? I see... Well, that's OK, it still plays songs..."

The built-in obsolescence is of a different kind, but it's as strong as any other company's.
Only Twitter can save us from URL shorteners
It sounds like Haiku is still in the "pine for the days" stage of development:

Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you :-)

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/t...
The post mentions which bike he rides - a BMW.

Something else to consider - many of the newer BMW designs have moved to the 'standard' approach. Why make the move, given the 'brand' value already mentioned and the history behind the design?

3 reasons come instantly to mind - consistency, human physiology and safety. :-)
What makes a good manager?
So I have been working at a newspaper company for about 1.5 years now building stuff with Django. An opportunity came up to interview for the manager position, title is Rapid Development Team Manager, and my interview is at 4pm today.

I was just wondering if anybody has some tips on what I might be able to expect. What are they looking for in a manager?

(I already have some ideas on why I'm different and what I think needs to be changed, but I want to have a better idea of what they are looking for)
If there is one company on the web I really don't like it is 'Ilike'. They keep on spamming their 'viral' emails.

It makes sense for myspace though, they're well over their top and have now refocused on music (since social networking has all but been cornered by facebook):

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com

So, buying up music sites that have some traffic may plug the hole.
QFT: Using a do-not-reply address to communicate ... sends a message that the organization's time is more valuable than yours.

Though there are legitimate exceptions - I'm thinking, for example, of an opt-in automated status update that has the sole purpose of sending you a piece of information to which you would have no particular need to reply.
anonaskhn, Listen to this guy!

Life and work are marathons, not sprints. Take the time to develop good life-long habits and your pursuit of a band-aid will seem like what it really is: frivilous and mistaken.

My experience is a lot like ErrantX's. I'm in this for the long haul and I've developed an indefinitely sustainable method of work for myself. It involves all aspects of my mind and body and everything I do.

Your pursuit of drugs for performance gain may work in the near term. It most certainly will not for the long term. Please reconsider.
It would be hard to create truly "functional" hardware. A piece of hardware is a real physical object with an internal state which is shared by all accessors and which can change over time. Shared, modifiable state is the exact opposite paradigm from the one that pure functional languages use.

I think this is also why pure functional languages are so hard for "normal" people to understand -- their basic premise is the opposite of the real world around us that's filled with stateful physical objects.
Ask HN:  If everyone could program, would you feel less self-worth?
It's easy to imagine a world where programming is a required skill just as reading is.

Would you want to live in such a world?
You mean meth?

Then I recommend watching:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=videos&search...
Cool! background-color works but color does not.

text-decoration:line-through; works and that is what I use for marking the websites to avoid. Thanks for the cool tool.
The Mathematics of Marriage
> the days where you had to take your patch to the project and that was both your first and essentially last resort are gone.

They were never here. It's always been easy to fork a project, or put patches up on a web page or whatever. git makes it a little bit easier, but it doesn't change the dynamic of participating in a community much: you have to send in a patch, explain what it does, why it does it, what problems it fixes, what it improves, what costs or side effects it may have, and so on. If you send in something big (either in terms of code or effects), and care about getting it included, you may have to modify it or be prepared to defend it or otherwise work on it.

git/github are not a magic replacement for this communication.

Sure, you can just put stuff up on github and call it good, not caring what happens to it, but that doesn't really drive things forward as much as interacting with other people to reason about what's going on.
Sure because there are always different levels of skill and desire.

My self-worth is dependent on how well I think I solved a given problem, not the fact that there are others who could solve it also.
Why not just segregate your coffee shop a little?

Have a large number of small, work-centric tables, then a 'laptop-free' area with larger tables, and maybe some comfy chairs and couches. Have a big polite (or goofy) sign that suggests one side is for chatting and flirting, and one for writing and nerding.

I'd put the laptops near the windows so the place always looks full, but likely has free space in the back.

Tryst in Adams Morgan in Washington DC turns their wifi off on the weekends, which also seems like a reasonable compromise.
a one page comparison of NYC vs SF, blurgh...
Rarely do corporate results give me such a warm and fuzzy feeling as Lego being reborn in the middle of a recession (or towards the end, actually it doesn't matter. Go Lego!).
I was looking for the "read more" link on that post, but those two paragraphs is the whole thing. Nothing new, just ordinary linkjacking?
Wish you all the best Zed.
This is a pretty helpful document to help folks understand what's really common. Unfortunately, while it's nice to see a 1x liquidation preference, when multiple rounds happen these often turn nasty as each investor starts to look out for themselves in the pile. Unfortunately, the entrepreneur is usually a loser in that scenario unless the exit is at a nice valuation. A great argument why an up-round isn't always a good thing.
How I grew to hate every computer language
There is, however, something wrong with providing incentives for local governments to manipulate rules to turn people into criminals, particularly when those manipulations actually make driving (in this case) more dangerous. Seriously -- do you not see the potential danger in giving local government an incentive to shorten yellow lights just to catch more people in a ticketable offense?
Not all the time, but often, yes.

A very simple example is user input and output: I want to print the prompt text before I let the user type their input.

The same is true for plenty of other hardware: I need to move the robot forward before I turn on the drill; I need to print page 1 before page 2 - etc etc. There are plenty of inherently sequential operations, thats all I was trying to say. ;-)

But you are not incorrect - obviously there IS some hardware which is only sequential because it was designed for von Neumann machines to drive it.

Dataflow hardware can exist (there are, or were, dataflow processors made) and hardware itself is inherently dataflow. In fact, VHDL and Verilog are inherently dataflow languages (possibly) running on FPGAs, which I guess could be seen as a sort of low level dataflow processor.

EDIT: @scott_s: Sure, but the end effect is the same, isn't it?
I think it would be nice to register FlushCookies.com and have it provide information about how to kill off Flash Cookies with a prominent link to the rather obscure page on Adobe's site: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

Unfortunalely, I'm too busy to set up that site, but feel free if you've got the time.
Ah, yes, it's in there the 'My bike' bit.

I can see the 'consistency' angle. After all, if 90% of the market does it one way being 'counter culture' is sometimes helpful sometimes a hindrance. User interfaces on motorbikes are a lot less easily customized than on websites after all.

I see some reasons why the BMW design is better, but there is lots of evidence to the contrary out there:

http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/community/Forums/Categorie...
Don't.

As someone who used them for a long time I can tell you:

They are not physically addictive - I could also have easily stopped for a month. When I did stop the problems were psychological like the fact that most of my "friendships" were shallow and drug based

It destroys your judgment. I once wrote a programming language (a scripting language for an app I was working on). It didn't support minus numbers - something I hadn't spotted until someone complained.

It turns you into an arsehole - speed users are arseholes, unreliable , untrustworthy and self centered.

On the plus side if you accept that you are going to do it and manage yourself (make sure you have nutrition , plan for coming down, learn to deal with the myriad of problems - getting stuck in a "groove" - ie fixated on one small (and often pointless) task, memory issues etc.) you can be extremely functional on it - I took it for years.

The being an arsehole thing is the main reason I stopped - I haven't touched it for more than a decade now. I have had some good results with Adrafinil which gives great focus, has less of the bad stuff and if you work with your body clock even lets you sleep pretty normally. If I need to sprint on something I take it for a few days and get loads done.
There are good reasons I not only don't live in CA any longer, but intend to never visit the place again. What a hole. . . .
False.

1) Larger companies have servers dedicated to sending out mass emails and the email address has to resolve back to the sending server properly or the spam filters kill it.

2) They need you to click the links in the email for analytics. Learning what offers get the most traction HELPS them AND YOU so they deliver relevant content in the future.

3) If you use a "support" or "sales" email as the sender and then send the mass email to 100,000 people, you are going to get 20,000 bounce-backs, littering your support email channel and support software with garbage.

4) You can't have people replying with "don't email me again" because those will get missed. Again, you can't have a large list and realistically go through all the bounce-backs looking for legitimate unsubscribe messages - the links IN the email need to be used for this.

It's not fair to compare email campaigns to calling a company on the phone. Apples and Oranges.
Try sheet music?
I think one other reason why von Neumann-type imperative programming was chosen over dataflow IS because sequential instructions and shared memory makes a lot of sense to us.

Having said that, a lot of non-programmers use graphical dataflow languages all the time, so maybe dataflow is ACTUALLY easier (at least for non-programmers - maybe the mathematical feel of imperative code attracts us programmers to it?) - eg, graphics tools often have dataflow languages for defining animations, materials, lighting and so on. I once used a dataflow tool for generating 3D visualizations and it was very intuitive.
How Technology Is Changing Innovation
Colonics, New York Colon Therapy, NY Colonic, Hydrotherapy, Constipation
New York Colonics Center, Optimal Wellness of Long Island offers colon hydrotherapy sessions, colon cleansing, quantum reflex analysis, ear candling, infra red- saunas and other natural healing treatments.
As a high-school drop out my academic history is non-existent, I have a typing diploma and a drivers license, I don't know where you picked that up.

I do believe that it is possible to learn outside of academia, I work pretty hard to make up for my lack of formal education. My family circumstances were such that an academic career was not a possibility, I'm still not sure if I should regret that or not.

Installing linux on beowulf clusters is indeed trivial, but when they're made up of toasters I think I'll pass.

Let's just say that I've been pretty busy in the last couple of decades, what have you been up to, other than sniping at people from behind your comfortable wall of anonymity ?

Would you like me to type up a full CV with references or will you just take my word for it ?
Has some basic info about Steven Rambam in it, who gave an awesome talk at Last HOPE about tracking down a guy many times, many ways.
Why is imperative programming still by far the most popular and widely used form of programming?

Because the world, in most cases, is sequential and our brain has learned from babyhood (and probably over evolutionary time too) the sequential style of processing.

No wonder mathematics & functional programming is hard for 99+% of the population and most programmers, (People here are mostly above average, so YMMV)
It would probably be better. It wouldn't hurt any of our egos, because only a few people would be able to program well, just as, despite near universal literacy, only a few people can write well. But people would at least give us precise bug reports when things broke.
It seems to me like YC's position in the market space allows for potentially better identification of potential products. But will people be as 'sold out' on foreign ideas? We're never as careful with other people's property as we are our own.

Hopefully by not saying, "exactly what we're looking for," PG et al. can avoid that problem while potentially glomming on even better ideas.

PG does better at 'letting go' than so many people, it's impressive.
If you brake really hard, you may get rear-ended -- particularly if you're driving a gigantic beast of an SUV and the car behind you is a Geo Metro. I never assume someone's doing something wrong just based on the law; I also check for other factors like who's around them, what those other people are doing, whether the street is wet or oily, et cetera.

. . . and whether the speed limit in a particular area is artificially low to increase ticketing revenue.
FL is cute.

If you want to try it out this is a fun tool:

http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~paoluzzi/plasm/

It's a dialect of FL with stuff tossed in for programmatically generating 3d models.

I'm not aware of any other easily accessible working implementations of FL-alike languages.
Twitter is a fad. Not newsworthy at all.
Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 – 2TB | Modern Gadgets
Peering inside Tiger’s mid-brain
Why is simple design so hard?
I'm surprised all of these ppl stayed in the US. I would imagine it's a lot harder to track someone down if they disappeared to the other side of the world.
But these bouncebacks are predictable, no? There are several key words in them that identify them as bouncebacks, no? So make a spam filter for them, and it'll work great, especially because the mail programs aren't trying to evade spam filters with their messages.
Music startups: What a crappy investment
Ah; sorry. My posted wasn't pointed at you. I didn't mean technical MS employees ..

I meant the marketing/propaganda folks, who can certainly be counted upon to attempt to sway popular opinion in Microsoft's favor through targeted posting on a popular, high-traffic forum with educated readership.
Definitely a joke. Check the testimonials:

"My first three wives divorced me because I always forgot anniversaries. I am pretty sure my fourth marriage will work thanks to the Girlfriend app?" Mark, 22

22 yr old who's been married 4 times? ;)

"I just drove by a brown barn and it reminded me of your eyes."

Etc...
Why is this on HN's front page? :(
Now an app that let me take the grunt work out of managing multiple girlfriends might be worth some money.
even in a world where reading is a required skill, there are many people who can't, many people who are bad at it, and many people who are professionally good at it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_architecture
This is why I said "halfway". Ruby isn't a replacement for Common Lisp (or Scheme) in the macro department; it just gets close enough that you can see Common Lisp (or Scheme) from there.

Consider that, when speaking literally of getting halfway to something, you have exactly as far to go still as the distance you've already traveled. It's not like I said Ruby was most of the way there, y'know.
I went through a similar progression. Then I learned SML. I haven't started hating it yet, and it's been about 6 years. YMMV, but I generally find that the things I hated most about most "main stream" programming languages are absent in languages like ML and Haskell (and I assume in F# too, though I haven't really used it).
Years of trying to breed a new generations of super-engineers by providing them with plastic building blocks throughout their early life finally paid of.
The Future of News Will Be Social
Why is imperative programming still the most widely understood and used form by far (despite its certain weaknesses)?

Because the world, in most cases, is sequential. Understanding of time and tenses are very important for navigating life. We learn to process in sequential style from babyhood (and likely over evolutionary time as well).

Mathematics (anything beyond basic) and functional programming are hard for 99+% of population and more than half of programmers. (People here are above average, so your mileague may vary.)

Functional programming corresponds to the Present Simple tense in English. The tense is not that common in everyday conversation and we rarely see it in complex sentences apart from technical/scientific writing. No wonder most people have little training for such style of thinking.
one could argue this guy doesn't get NY. (by making almost the same arguments that is)
I think it's inaccurate to characterize VHDL and Verilog as "languages running on FPGAs." FGPAs aren't designed in anyway to run those languages; they're designed to emulate hardware. Since those are the languages used to describe hardware - including modern processors - what they produce can be mapped to run on an FPGA.
Christianity and Neurology
I remember reading something about a fundamentalist sect of Christianity being "at war" with neurology instead of evolution in terms of being something "blasphemous" to the concept of a soul.

However, after thinking about it, what exact threats would strong AI or an entirely material soul have on Christianity? Actually, the alternative viewpoint that many fundamentalists (that immaterial components functions fully with a material organ, and then consequently leave after death) makes no sense at all from a theological perspective, and I really don't see exactly why certain Christians have a problem with this. I'd imagine that if there was a God in control of heaven, he could probably just copy aspects of the material "unit" into something not material.

Does anybody know what exactly is so nerve-shattering about the concept of an entirely material personality (and with that, strong AI?)
Interesting to see a New Yorker's view of SF, but why do we care? Who is Zed Shaw and why is he important?
> <em>I understand that a large email blast will generate all kinds of auto-responses, email bounce messages, and other forms of invalid replies, but with some decent filtering and a little work an organization could surely separate the wheat from the chaff. It's the least they could do to in exchange for reading their message.</em>

I don't think the author appreciates how difficult this is. It's just not realistic in all situations, especially situations where the user knowingly signs up to receive an automated message.

I normally use Error-To for do-not-reply, and post a valid reply-to header, but in many scenarios this isn't enough. dpcan's first comment is particularly relevant > "the email address has to resolve back to the sending server properly or the spam filters kill it"
I use Ryan Tomayko's git-sh, a "git mode" for Bash that includes the branch in the prompt, and also adds the most common git commands as top-level commands (so you can type "checkout master" instead of "git checkout master"):

http://github.com/rtomayko/git-sh/tree/master
Having a minor cluster for my project, I must admit that I am infatuated with the idea of building a cluster in a container and putting it somewhere, perhaps out on the prairie. The attractive thing about containers is that the container itself costs approximately $usd 0. And with the new realization that we don't need to cool things to the goosebump level anymore, the idea is quite attractive.
On HTML 5 Drag And Drop
Brightkite Augmented Reality - See through walls
Would vote this up 10 million times, if I could.

This is because the structures of ML and Haskell are based on the structure of logical proof, through the Curry-Howard isomorphism. Most programming languages are constructed on top of arbitrary decisions made by their designers.
I have never, to my knowledge, been on the Delicious front page. However, they're the only social bookmarking I have ever had success with. Slap that beautiful, beautiful Delicious button which says "X people have saved this" (social proof!) on a meaty reference article aimed at geeks and you'll get a long-tail stream of tech-oriented linkerati visiting that page for years, rather than the typical big-one-minute-gone-the-next tidal wave of ADHD chipmunks hopped up on crystal meth.

This has resulted in a few of my reference articles getting more than enough links to justify the pixels.
I find this an interesting post, but I must partially disagree.

Performance is not always the the primary issue in programming. Using python I am much more worried about code readability, maintainability, and programmer speed than I am code speed. And Python certainly is designed in a way that makes true high performance somewhat challenge. If I were ever truly concerned about maximizing performance, I would use C++ or similar.

On the other hand, performance is always a consideration. It should never be totally forgotten about. For instance, if you will be using a single regex pattern multiple times in a program (or putting it in a loop) the performance increase from compiling it once is noticeable and does not subtract from any of the other attributes. Similarly, in many cases a list comprehension will be faster than an equivalent for loop.

Python performance is not a fool's errand, but I do think that people programming in python should realize they are making something of a trade off (unladen swallow and future research may partially change this in the future.)

(Edited to fix spelling typo.)
Exactly this. There's plenty of legitimate one-way uses of email communication.

When I'm getting confirmation emails from Amazon after having bought something, for example, I do not expect to be able to reply to the machine sending them out -- it doesn't make much sense.

I'll go further with my argument: the ability to reply via email doesn't guarantee my communication will be dealt with in an appropriate or timely manner. Far better, I think, to go to the support section of a site and use a guided process to get my query to either answer the question myself or to have it directed down the appropriate channel.
This article has been added to my 'must read' list. I find myself getting thrown into the CSS pit and need a solid intro to it. Thanks for posting it!