skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose it probably never looks like oppression to people who aren't being oppressed until a bunch of people not in the original oppressed class die. (I was going to say "until someone dies" until I remembered all the people who died for the "war on drugs" in the US, and how it seems like most people still think it's a good thing.)
Branchr Advertising Acquires Online Collaboration Software Maker Atomplan
I'm not a huge smalltalk user, but I really really like Pharo. It feels much more developer friendly than the default Squeak VM.
SAT scores show disparities by race, gender, family income
Proton Pack Hacked by the Ghostbusters
Ask HN: What are the best developer/hacker focused blogs?
I am sure we all read Coding Horror, Spolsky, Zed and Hanselman, but can this community help me identify some of the other great developer/hacker focused bloggers?
The site says they're held the last Thursday of every month.
As someone who played competitive Guitar Hero...

It's not that it's "Doomed." It's that it got really, really popular all of a sudden, and that spike is dying down. Rhythm games are a genre that's lasted quite a long time. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
I think you may have misunderstood my point, which is that peak performance is attained when a few drivers drive altruistically (as the author does) and the rest drive "normally". If all drivers choose the same behavior (all altruistic or all normal), then the system doesn't work as well. This is interesting from a game-theoretic standpoint.

The author says much the same thing on his FAQ page:

If EVERY driver was to constantly maintain a HUGE space regardless of speed, then it would probably cause problems. The merge-zones might stop jamming, but the capacity of major highways would be reduced. On-ramps would become choked as traffic backed up into them, and there would be slowdowns extending far out into the countryside.

It is, of course, a purely theoretical problem, since there is no shortage of non-altruistic drivers.
In terms of real money, there is no money to pay the debt. The banknotes are just debt to pay another debt. It's backed by trust in a good future and a lot of promises of the working horde. But.... what if the crowd can't cope with it anymore? We can't predict the future and sure we can't predict mistakes made by banks or other investors. We can't let the people pay for these mistakes continuely, because the promises aren't built upon that. As long as there is no way to deal with these 'errors', there is no real way to predict investment either. Injecting 'money' (more debt) is not a cure nor a surety.
There doesn't seem to be any realization on the part of the programmer that a particular language is just a tool, usually designed for a specific application. The programmer is attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole, and they're cursing at the square peg because it doesn't fit.

Ummmm, wrong! The author isn't saying "PHP sucks because it doesn't have closures like my favorite language, so it's dead to me!". The author is saying "PHP claims to support closures, but when you actually attempt to use them for anything useful, they're broken."

So what he's actually cursing is that he has a round hole, and something that looks like a round peg, except it's really not.
The president can pardon anyone for any reason except impeachment. See http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_pard.html for more information.

EDIT: I stand corrected to the comment below.
"...our target support is PHP 4.3.0, so this leads to some creative (i.e. fun) problems at times."

"PHP is as "complete" as it needs to be for us."

It's so complete that it's painful to write in? There's something to be said for languages that focus on a particular application while peripheral features suffer, but the PHP language is in no way superior to Python or Ruby, even in regards to web development, and there's no problem with saying so.

People use PHP because lots of other people know it, and because it's widely available. Those aren't merits of the language itself. Yes, good things can be written in PHP. That doesn't mean the language isn't demonstrably inferior.
Ask HN: Please Review my iPhone App (Use an External Keyboard to Send SMS)
I've just launched my first iPhone app (NoTap SMS) that lets users type text messages for the iPhone using any connected PC's keyboard.

I think that it may be useful to send SMS faster (not where on-the-go) expecially for not-ASCII languages where tapping on the iPhone keyboard is painful (most European/Asian languages).

I've sold about 20 copies of the app to date and I'm planning to release a free version in the next few days (users of the free version will be allowed to send at most 10 messages, then they'll need to upgrade).

It would be great to have some feedback from other HN'ers.

Thanks!

<a href="http://www.notap.it">www.notap.it</a>
> On a side note that reinforces the financial problem with capital punishment. It often costs more money to execute someone than simply lock them up for life.

That analysis misses a lot of important details.

Prisons kill people all the time. The only thing special about capital punishment is that we know when it's going to happen.

If you believe that the review for capital punishment is what's required to justify killing someone, then clearly a lot of people aren't getting anywhere near adequate review.

The way things are now, you're actually innocent, you're much better off being sentenced to death than sentenced to life - you've got much better odds of getting out alive.

If you're actually concerned about innoncent folks, death row is the least of your concerns.
Hey at least they didn't use <blink></blink> (they used "text-decoration: blink;" instead!)
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=786532

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784104

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783800
Since did lack of support stop anyone from finding a way to run it?
Windows gets updates, bad! Windows has security vulnerabilities, bad! Seriously? This is why no one takes these people seriously. The one valid argument about standards completely overlooks IE and instead focuses on OpenOffice, which has no significant marketshare.
My guess is that many developers probably don't actually choose PHP per se but rather get stuck using it because that's what the shop they work for uses, or that's what the current site is implemented in and they're only adding a feature, or that's what the client is asking for, etc.

More interesting to me is the question: Why is PHP beating Python in this space? Some guesses:

* PHP webapps far easier to deploy.

* PHP docs give more usage examples, and also allow user comments.
Perhaps what you are really saying is you don't follow people who don't also know you, ie with whom you have a two-way relationship?
Article should be down-modded for misinformation. Here's Scalia's argument in plain language: Federal courts don't get override legal state convictions. Even if the prisoner files a writ of habeas corpus to a federal court, that court simply doesn't have the power under federal law to override the state conviction.

Scalia doesn't think that "actual innocence" (a legal term, not an English term, look it up) is any sound basis for granting federal courts that power. And once the door is opened to override the states on that ground, they'll basically be able to override it for anything.

If a state makes a mistake, the place to correct that is through state appeals and state supreme courts. The federal courts only come into it through Congressional legislation or unconstitutionality.

PDF of the dissent here: http://supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/08-1443Scalia.pdf
This is a reasonable statement.

But there's a bit of a delta between this and the attention-grabbing title of the post.
I used to give them the benefit of the doubt on that. I've now changed my view to: it's probably more difficult than it looks, but Twitter makes it look impossible.
Part of the problem is that once you start using closures and lambdas all over the place, it's really hard to go back to a language without them. Yes, some tools weren't meant to do some jobs, but PHP's competition has those features, and they work, and they work well. If they wanted to make a simple language without those features, fine, but that won't stop people from complaining that it doesn't have them, and it won't stop people from complaining when those features don't work the way that everyone else's versions of the features work.
I disagree with this article on one point. In my experience the casual gamers always want to either sing or play drums and get easily frustrated on guitar. I think that rock bands appeal was that it is cooperative rather than who plays guitar better, dances better, or sings better like every rhythm game before it.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430320

That's where I first read about this.
Ask HN: How much customer development/acquisition do you generally do?
Some web apps are pretty easy to build, and can be prototyped rather quickly.

Do you generally jump right into development when you have a good idea? Or do you poll the potential market first to see if the product you're building has a chance?
Cheryl Richardson calls it a "definite yes." If it is not a definite yes, then it is a no. http://www.cherylrichardson.com/store/take-time-for-your-lif...

She makes a good point: When I have too much going on, the last thing I want to think about is adding more things to do (more physical workouts, more time to make better meals, more books on my "to read" pile, etc.). Instead, she recommends starting out by removing things. This then frees up time for the eventual adding of appropriate things (dictated by your personal priorities).

Kind of like the feeling of a sparsely furnished room versus a crowded one: Room to breathe.
Of course you can, but that's not going to work when you run out of stack space. The point of my stupid benchmark was to write the equivalent ruby code, and then the equivalent C code, forgetting the fact that there's a much more optimal way to do it (e.g. write it in scheme with tail calls).
Because I want my twitter stream to consist largely of people at my own level, and I have a twitter ratio of ~= 1. People with higher ratios (I follow a few, but not many) are usually so busy or important that I've no reason to follow their tweets, just as they've no reason to follow mine.
I've always been intrigued by the P vs. NP problem. If I had to bet, I'd say P != NP, but imagining a world where P = NP is like imagining a world where a Star Trek-like utopia is suddenly achievable. It definitely would make the Internet feel like a "footnote" in history.
The president has pardon power for federal crimes only, he does not have pardon power for state crimes. The constitution is pretty explicit about this, qualifying with "offenses against the United States".

Wikipedia has a much more thorough explanation than I can come up with right now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon):
In the United States, the pardon power for federal crimes is granted to the President of the United States under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution states that the President "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." The Supreme Court of the United States has interpreted this language to include the power to grant pardons, conditional pardons, commutations of sentence, conditional commutations of sentence, remissions of fines and forfeitures, respites and amnesties.
"nothing to do with IE"

Huh? It's on MSDN. And pimping Silverlight. Suuuure, nothing to do with IE. Uh-huh.

You get a grip, Mr New Account with 1 comment. So what do you say when people ask you what you do? "Oh, I create accounts on discussion sites and pretend to be excited about Microsoft products"
It's spelled "lambda".
Lol :) I can't believe that actually happened to you? I've been telling that story for years as an example of how some people will never be satisfied.
I never said it did, but simply took issue with the fact they tried to back away from "we're not supporting it" when in reality they really aren't supporting it. I use CS3 and I'd be very surprised if it ends up being incompatible.
> Is there anyone who really doesn't believe there's more than one self-consistent, sensible way to write code?

The existence of multiple ways to write sensible code does not imply that every way to write code is sensible.

BTW - Do you have any significant experience with "backwoods Christians" or are you just winging it from your ignorance? (I've run into several who taught themselves Greek so they could read ancient religious texts.)
I'm of the mind that even the guilty have the right not to be executed ... but I live in one of those industrialized liberal democracies (i.e. every one other than the USA) that has rejected execution as a barbaric throwback to a less civilized era.
Out of curioisity, how do you feel when white people are photoshopped over for the appearance of diversity?
PHP fits an important niche. People sometimes use PHP because it is faster and has a smaller memory footprint than Python or Ruby.
Python does not do tail call optimization.
If there's anything good about PHP that I can tell, its that development is heavily community driven and has been since the early days. However, I think PHP got so popular, and so quickly, that in many cases the community's desire for features has led to an inconsistent, and in your view, 'broken' system. The need for backwards compatibility from almost the very beginning has taken its toll, I think. Is it really 'broken' though? Of course, similar concepts have been implemented in other languages much more elegantly. But PHP is not about elegance - it's about backwards compatibility, and responding to community feature requests.

I'm not a part of the community, and I'm no longer a PHP developer (if I can help it) but I can't think of any other reason the global functions would still have inconsistent argument orders almost 14 years on. So, if the 'correctness' of their implementation bothers you, do what I did: move on. Because it will never get any better.

Incidentally, I wrote an anti-PHP rant last year called "Why PHP Won" that made its rounds here. It's pretty easy to get fed up with PHP, especially when you know there's better stuff out there. Once you're at that point though, you're done. It's anything-else time.
I've always felt there is a huge, untapped gold mine waiting in these games: the ability to upload your own songs and have them automatically converted to playable tracks in the game.

Of course, this relies on two things:

1. Automatic conversion actually being feasible.

2. Record labels allowing this to happen.

Somehow 1. seems more solvable than 2.
Semi-off-topic, but I found something seriously wrong with Craigslist.

https://post.craigslist.org/manage/1340717167/tkrju#tr231033

That link will allow you to edit that post. You don't even have to be logged in.

I've already alerted them, but let's see how long this lasts.
I'm guessing your definition of pain is different then mine - I don't have any issues with writing PHP - it just works for me. I've been developing in PHP since 2002, so by now I'm used to the language and how it works, and don't really have any expectations for new features.

I can see however that coming from a language like Python or Ruby, you're probably going to try to develop in PHP like you would in one of those languages - and I believe that is where frustration will be found. I think it's good to think of PHP as a "simpler" language - stick with the basics and it will work well (as well as be pretty fast).
Clickable link: http://www.notap.it/
Where are the States Rights trolls when you need them?
This is a general problem in finance. People get paid more and more with raising volume of their work. So they are happy to see it increase. OTOH they do not take the real risk of their gamble. If they fail, they lose their job, at worst. So what?
Just a minor quibble, not meant to detract your point: it's curious that even as you criticize America's sense of morality, you seem to use "gentlemen" as opposed to "womanizer".
great hack in my opinion...
Like so many on both sides of the aisle, he was too long a 'public servant.' Rest and be at peace.
Sorry; it wasn't meant to be attention grabbing. It was more out of frustration, I suppose.
Oddly, I've never even heard of most of these myths.
I think you just got buzzworded, ;-)...

It sounds like this magical "push" thing already exists. It is called "get" and "post".

For example, my website is a stupid news aggregator (http://www.gibsonandlily.com). If a story gets more than ~30 points (which is really rare since there are only a few people that post there), it calls up tinyurl and says:

"Hey...tinurl, if you wouldn't mind, could you please give me a tinyurl of this link so that I can post it to twitter?"

Tinurl responds

"Hey, I'M TOO BUY POSTING TO TECHCRUNCH, GO AWAY!"

To which my server says

"But c'mon, tinurl...pleaaaseeee????"

Tinurl:

"Fine, here, no go AWAY! Also, aren't I frigging revolutionary?!"

Then it calls up twitter and says

"Hey, uhm...brah, like zomfg wutcha doin? Check out this uber link!"

and twtitter posts it.

This isn't some revolutionary "push" feature, this is just standard cgi action.

It sounds like this is the same thing, just in reverse...which really isn't that "revolutionary", more like "duh".
or we'd all just get wiped out by a super virus by some jerk messing around after solving protein folding.
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/is_17_the_mos...
If still alive he'd be a major force for passing the kind of healthcare legislation that could have liberated Americans from employer-provided insurance as the only option. This would have freed a great deal of energy for risks like starting a business. That he became sick and died now is a a loss of leadership in the effort to make the dynamism of entrepreneurship, among other things, available to more people.
IMHO, I find it useless. Maybe for long messages (splitted, >500chars) in East-European languages it's a good idea, but not for any Western European language (English, French, Spanish... yeah, it's maybe a little bit slower to write but not a pain, at all).

Anyway, the whole process (open the app, write in my computer then copypaste to the message app) is slow and painful. It would be "better" to have an associated username (with password) in the computer+in the iPhone. For example: I open the app, I write in my computer that long-long message, the app automatically updates (COMET anyone?) and I just tap a "send" button, which opens the message app with the message already written...

... but in fact, the whole idea is pretty useless, we don't write messages as we write emails. And for emails, we already have another way to do it :-)
Experiments with parallel genetic programming in clojure
Blind man has perfected a sonar technique called echo location [vid]
Maptor – Map and Projector Device
does this mean that if I am using tweetdeck on a mac that i am vulnerable?
An Illustrative Welfare Analysis of Google Reader
Another mobile payment system, this time by Nokia
I realize that -- but when writing a short comment I have to generalize. I know this isn't fair to everyone.
> Google interviews test technical ability, not creative ability. This is suboptimal when it comes to innovation via 20% time.

The "uncreative" could recognize creativity and join creative projects. Better yet, both could join valuable projects.

As someone who is said to be quite creative, I think that creativity is usually mis-evaluated, that the problem isn't under appreciation or over appreciation. (Oh, and much of what passes for creativity isn't. It's merely different.)

Creativity is not a subsitute for other good things, even though it often gets the blame when the failure is with those things.
Computing: The Fourth Great Domain of Science
I have always believed "the end justifies the means" to be a statement of evil, and I guess I see "I see no harm in looking at a man's accomplishments and ignoring his failures" to be uncomfortably close.

The problem I see with that attitude is that it opens up a whole lot of people (who are broadly agreed to be better off unborn) to lionization. Maybe Kennedy did help a lot of people, but maybe someone else would have done more in his position. At the moment that tested his personal beliefs, that required action rather then crafted words, he failed and someone died.

When powerful people can get away with acts that would damn the normal people, I see precious little hope that government will be about what would actually help the people.
why aren't we getting euro diesels in the us?
The only problem with this is that some say no to everything. Sivers isn't addressing them at all, but we wouldn't want to go evangelize this point of view to everyone. Some people need to say yes a lot more. Also, there are categories of the types of things that should default toward hell yeah or no. The boundaries there would be person specific.
I didn't say Europe doesn't have its own issues -- my point was that the US seems to be trying to ignore race while being obsessed about it. That doesn't work.
Anyone hear of Guitar Rising? http://www.guitarrising.com/

In short it's Guitar Hero, except player use real guitars instead just mashing on buttons
It's your first programming assignment, now what?
The corresponding PHP bug report:

http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=47665

(Closed as "not a bug". Surprise!)
I've been mulling over an idea for a while:

A web service that would easily add a second factor of authentication to your existing application's login system.

Thoughts?
Unfortunately, turning a normal LCD on its side means you can't do sub-pixel anti-aliasing of fonts (at least in the horizontal direction, which is what you want.)
I like it too, drop me email too, please.
Heh, sure. I would note however that implementation speed conditions the kinds of algorithms you write. You can't really do realtime audio processing in Ruby -- so implementation performance limits the scope of your project.

I know, because I hack on Guile ;-) Fortunately in this case we come in at about 20 seconds. But there's a long way to go. I'm tired of the "slow language" question, and of having to drop down to C to do even modest number crunching.

And by "drop down to C", I really mean anything that's not written in the HLL (Scheme in my case) -- I'm less and less interested even by C libraries providing Scheme functions.
Good point, except for not practicing what you preach (perhaps that will come later?). The social networking section above the comments takes up more than a third of the height of my screen.
The best blogs for me, are those that are not for the great hacker public, but for smaller audiences. Blogs about mathematics, data mining, computer vision, and so on. Coding Horror, Spolsky and the alike only talk about generalities and aren't really useful to me.
> The thing about OOP is that you need your objects to belong to your solution domain, not your problem domain.

Would be great if someone wrote up a nice blog post giving a concrete example of how this works out in practice. That is, come up with some reasonable example of a problem to be solved, give some ideas for objects in the solution domain, and give some examples of possible objects in the problem domain that you should not use.
Is this basically Squeak with an "uncanny valley" OS X theme?
SwissEduc - Informatik - Programmieren lernen mit Kara
real time shopping is interesting
Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) wrote a blog entry about how, whenever someone asks him how he is, answers "fantastic". http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/self_talk/
Lose Weight Quick Without Any Side Effects With Fat Loss 4 Idiots
Oops, sorry. I always forget that support means different things to different people. When I wrote this title it was using support to mean ’Adobe won’t be fixing problems’, not ‘CS3 won’t work’.