skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."

Oh sorry, but that's the tone of voice I used to read this article.
I take a look on some screencasts and Ramaze looks very nice, will give it try.
Robots evolve to deceive one another : Not Exactly Rocket Science
I'd be interested to know if there has ever been a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees.

Anyone who has ever listened to a government manager talk at any level for any length of time will here them say something to the effect of "we just don't have enough people and resources". Case and point, after hurricane katrina,
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm
FEMA claims they are under staffed.

There really is no incentive for anyone in any corner of government to be efficient. If they start doing the same work with less money and less employees it reduces the clout of their department because they have less money and less employees and consequently less power and standing within the system. In business doing something for less increases profit in government there is no such incentive and likely an incentive to the other extreme.
A point on 4: Find or, in very extreme circumstances, write your own very lightweight profiler you can run on production servers. This will be a life-saver.

The bottlenecks are very rarely where you think they are. Even when they are, there is typically lots of low hanging fruit hanging around that you don't know about until you profile.

Also, you should have some sort of monitoring software running aggregating stuff like server loads, connection stats, number of db requests, memcached hits/misses, etc. Cacti I find quite good for this.
>This information can be found online or in the manual

So can the information on how you should partition your hard drive for Linux installation. Yet (historically) most people think Linux installation is a usability disaster.

Or for another way of looking at it, do you really think that an interface which requires you to go online (or read a manual) to figure out how basic stuff like undo or delete work represents "good usability"?

Also, as the author points out, what is "refresh" supposed to do in the context of a single message? Just because a symbol is familiar, it doesn't mean its meaning is automatically clear if it's taken out of context. For example, at my workplace recently got a new microwave that has a play/pause button. In this case, it's relatively easy to figure it out but it still gave me a pause.
Talking loudly on a cell phone, oblivious to the tranquility you destroy around you -- that will come pretty close.

I'd like to think restaurant patrons and mass transit commuters had consideration for others (and the presence of mind to talk quietly) but they often don't. Jamming is probably not a good solution, though.
Okay let's fantasize that the staff of NASA was willing to work for $1 / year - and that the cost per kg of sending stuff in to space converges to the energy cost of the chemical rocket fuel. I suspect that space flight is still pretty damn expensive. What happens in space to spacefaring humans that makes them cover the cost of going there plus a profit? Even something as obviously useful as launching communication sattelites is still very costly.
Maybe he intends to keep rehashing it until people understand. Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated.
The idea I've gotten from reading Taleb (articles, not books) is not that all models are useless, it's that assuming a normal distribution is often unjustified, and that once-in-a-century events come along quite a bit more often than that. Sure; he invented a catchphrase, not the exponential distribution--but "Black Swan" is more than just a cheap Australian Cabernet if it'll generate more positive awareness of systemic risks.
My company's big project right now is built in CodeIgniter. We picked a framework for a number of reasons, but mostly as a way of standardizing the code. Rather than everyone having some arbitrary way of doing something, we found it easier to use a set framework with its own conventions, at least in terms of naming schemes and file structure and whatnot.

We went with CodeIgniter on an outsider's suggestion, and in retrospect, it was probably not a great choice. We've found a few weird things in their core classes that we've had to modify, which should never happen. I've used Zend since that project and I greatly prefer it over CI. The documentation can be a little funny (explanations of functions are in places where you wouldn't expect it) but overall I've just found it to be much more robust.

I've heard good things about Kohana, so I think if I were to start a new project, I'd look into it. I think my biggest concern would be being able to update the core classes without having to rewrite all the code, so what ErrantX said here about Kohana going from MVC to HMVC is sort of worrisome.
Django aggregation tutorial
Can everyone please leave their populist "oh my god everything the government does is so god damn innefficient and if only we dismantle it and let 6 smart people run it instead it would be SO great" yammmering at home for a few decades because the thought of a world without NASA makes me very depressed.

It takes thousands of people BECAUSE of all the advances in technology and automation and robotics and computers and so on.

I'm just a casual observer and fan, so I don't know if this is actually true, but the Mars rover mission seemed 10x more complicated than the Moon landings. And that's the last one... not the upcoming one that looks even more awesome.

NASA is a poorly run, oversized govt agency, but give them credit for accomplishing some of the most amazing feats humanity has ever seen in recent years. And you know what... maybe that's what it takes.
Pressing a button is an action that a gestural UI can communicate visually, but there are a number of other actions that have no visual cue. Direct manipulation gestures such as tap (on something other than a button), double-tap, tap-and-hold, swipe, and pinch/zoom are far more difficult to communicate. These rely on user experimentation and memory.

Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.

I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.

It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom, undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement at all is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy requirements as much as they have.
Bing’s Marketshare Continued To Creep Upwards In July
also

1. caching is your friend

2. you probably need 2 load balancer (instead of 1) for high availability

3. probably need a SAN or shared storage somewhere when you have several web servers
How is this for power users? it looks the same to me.
What was your decision-making process when evaluating frameworks?

I'm a Microsoft guy and have been for 12+ years. When .NET Framework came out, that's just what I went with.

Was your ultimate choice made simply because the framework was the defacto in your language of choice?

No, I chose it because it was going to be popular in the MSFT community and, as a consultant/trainer for MSFT technologies, it's my job to know those things.

Assuming you're sufficiently experienced in framework X now, what are your regrets? What makes the other frameworks look like greener grass?

No regrets - it's "good enough". And nothing makes other frameworks look better to me. I can see how they look better/interesting to others but, for me, I'm happy with the .NET suite of tools/languages.

If you could start your project over again, would you chose the framework again?

Yes.

Did you choose framework X secretly because you just wanted to learn it?

I sort of answered this already - chosen because it was destined to be popular with my clients. At the time (2000), MS was putting tons of weight behind the marketing campaigns for .NET Framework and C# so you knew it was going to be supported. And, after coming from Visual Basic 6.0 and ASP, looking at the .NET Framework and ASP.NET - it was easily miles ahead of what we were currently able to do without .NET.
I disagree with "buy better hardware" (unless you are thinking of just additional RAM or getting a SSD instead of a regualar hardware)

imho you need to design with horizontal scaling in mind
I wonder what the repercussions are for religion? Does news like this threaten to derail believers' faith in God (or higher being(s))?

[EDIT]
Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?
The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation
Google On2 buyout deal had 'no shop' clause to stop On2 seeking better offers
Grooveshark.com | Mugasha.com

I like trance when studying. If I'm seriously in to the work, the music doesn't matter. I just want some music playing in the background.

And of course there are times I need just plain silence.
"The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space."

Surely that should be "could have been delivered". The article says that the C13 count was different from Earth collected samples. Where's the causality?
In addition, once ev realized the side project was better than his current startup, he shut down the original, gave back all the money to his investors, and raised for twitter.
I don't think that is what this article is talking about. It is discussing an aversion to any decrease in work force. Despite the fact that the option that would have potentially decreased the work force may have produced a more "amazing" result.
For me I based my choice on modularity, available components and available documentation.

I got tired of working on dozens of authentication/registration systems, or admin interfaces with sortable tables ... that's boilerplate that distracts you from the purpose of your project.

I'm currently using Catalyst (Perl) for heavy-weight projects. I like that I have CPAN modules at my disposal.

I'm also playing with Django (python) ... I like that it has already built independent modules (see Pinax / django-cms) and a customizable admin interface. It also has very good (free) documentation. I always wanted to get familiar with a CMS platform like Drupal, but I haven't found any that I liked, and Django seems like a good alternative.

I don't like Rails because currently it is too monolithic. There's no way you can replace ActiveRecord with little effort without losing functionality. It is also too heavy for my taste and makes too many assumptions about my application. Of the projects I worked on this year, none of them fits the Rails model.

I took a look at Merb (Ruby) and it looks good. But it doesn't have a large following. Version 2.0 will be merged with Rails, so Rails 3.0 looks promising.

I don't care about language choice as long as I like the language :)
This isn't what the author thinks it is. Google has simply added the ability to share documents and sites with groups that you define in the Google Apps interface.

What it is not is the addition of the Google Groups service (http://groups.google.com/) to the Google Apps suite.
We scale Streamfile.com with Erlang. Both front & back-end.

Check out:

http://www.erlang-web.org/
That is not the point that the article is making. The evaluation criteria for the potential missions favours missions that increase NASA's headcount over missions that, y'know, actually do stuff in space.

NASA has done some very impressive stuff it's true. But if you consider that it went from a standing start in 1958 to moon landing 11 years later, it ought to have done a lot more in the 40 years since then.
This is especially true in emergencies.
Seriously unimpressed.

I really, really hate it when people use very small neural networks and extrapolate the results to some sort of biological plausibility.

Also, isn't this at approximately the level of a first AI project? Building robots seems wholly unnecessary, because there appears to be no reason why it couldn't just be simulated.

What was the point of the poison? It was mentioned twice and then ignored. Turning off the light near food isn't "deception", it's just not communicating. If the robots lured each other towards poison, that might be something to write home about.

Come to think of it, even simulating this seems unnecessary, because given the way the experiment is designed, it's kinda like listening to Captain Obvious from the fortress of the blatantly apparent.

This really just sounds like cargo-cult science at its very worst. Perhaps they could team up with the guy training neural networks using the bible.
I usually just think about things, adding lots and lots of associations, specializations and generalizations between the new things and my existing knowledge. Once this is done, I just know it once someone asks me for it.

(And yes, I hate learning useless streams of numbers or words to know them exactly number by number or word by word)
Ask HN:  Please review re-release of launchly
Full disclosure - nearly two months ago I requested feedback for launchly. That being said I hope you will still take another look.

Recap: Launchly is devoted to getting web startups (like the ones that come here with posts like this) the feedback and exposure they need to succeed. Multiple rounds/iterations of feedback are fully supported and encouraged by the system. We also track all aspects of new launches and provide powerful analytics to help the site owner(s) focus on what matters - delivering value to their customers.

In the two months since I first released launchly the site has gone through quite a few changes and I'd like to get a feel for what the HN community thinks of the idea/site as it stands now.

Some of the biggest changes are a completely new feedback system with support for screenshots, new category and tag navigation, user profile pages, and by far the biggest of all - a reputation system.

I added the reputation system to try to enhance and encourage the community aspects of the site a-la StackOverflow. Users build up reputation by providing feedback and voting on launches. They also earn (or lose) reputation by others voting on their feedback quality. As your reputation increases so does your influence on the site (votes weighted more heavily, limited admin powers granted, etc.).

Another big change (which necessitated the reputation system) is the addition of a free Basic launch tier. When I first created launchly I had only planned to have paid plans. That hasn't worked out in practice, especially not while trying to build up the community, so I added the new free plan. The free plan leverages the reputation system by requiring users to spend 100 reputation (it's not deducted, just subtracted from what they have available) for a free launch. 100 rep would not take long to earn (4-5 feedbacks + voting) and it hopefully will encourage community participation and keep the spammers at bay.

Anyways, please let me know what you think of the updates and the change in direction launchly has taken.

I'd also love to hear any ideas anyone may have on other possible ways to monetize something like this. Lets face it, even if I get 100 launches a month (which seems high) and every new site opts to go for a $40 paid plan, that's still only $4,000 in revenue per month.

http://www.launchly.com
Not much more information than the Joel Test. I disagree with the statement about hardware, "bonus points for Macs". As a daily Mac user and Java/RoR developer I am just as productive on my Ubuntu box as I am on my Mac. Having a Mac is nice, but not something I would choose a job over. IMHO, bonus points should only be awarded for something rare, like a tech gadget allowance.
"in the UK, where all cars I've seen had their indicator stalks on the left."

I've driven quite a few different cars (mainly UK, some Spanish/French hire cars, SEAT/Peugot) as we used to hire instead of owning and so I'd drive a different make/model every time. They differ in indicator placement. Similarly some cars use a stalk (rotating end switch) for headlights whilst others use a dashboard mounted dial switch. Some cars have a stalk-end switch for the horn whilst others use buttons either side of the steering wheel and others use the whole steering wheel center (this appears to be less common now as it has an air-bag in it though Renaults have always had a stalk based horn from what I can tell).

My current car, a Citroen Xsara Picasso (right hand drive) has a left-stalk, the car I learnt in (many years ago) was a Nissan Micra 1.0 and had a right-stalk indicator. I'm afraid I can't remember on the others to be certain but they definitely have been a mixture. I think the Renault Megane Scenic we had prior to this had the indicator right-stalk as I clearly remember putting the wipers on when lane changing - but that might well be that the hire cars we used around that time (2 different Vauxhalls) had the indicator that side, not sure.
He could have run it through JSLint. It catches not wrapping the body of a for-in block in a hasOwnProperty conditional.

Example:

var arr = [0,1,2,3,4,5];
for(var p in arr) { console.log(arr[p]); }
Array.prototype.foo = "bar";
for(var p in arr) {
if(arr.hasOwnProperty(p)) {
console.log(arr[p]);
}
}
for(var p in arr) { console.log(arr[p]); }

If you run this in firebug's console, you'll notice that the first two loops work as expected, even after changing the prototype of the Array object. The third one, however, will spit out "bar" as well.

JSLint can be mean to your code, but it helps catch an enormous amount of small bugs like this caused by JS's warts.
Scooter Dropship
Perhaps he interpreted your comment to mean "less energy for the hacker to build" rather than "less battery power for the device to operate."
Sorry, yes - I epoxied it in, and then capped the channels with wood strips.

It added weight and it changed the acoustics when it got moved around.
Clickable link: http://www.launchly.com

EDIT: Had a quick poke around. Note, I did not look at your previous iteration. This review reads more as a narrative because I am just flicking between tabs to add comments.

It looks good. I must say my personal taste is a little more minimalist and so I find your site a little busy. At the top there are lots of options to choose from. I wonder if you can't cut down on or combine some of those buttons. Oh, I know what those buttons do now, they filter the list. Was a little un-intuitive for me.

Following on from my previous paragraph, why not get rid of all that text starting "Iterative feedback..." in the middle and just have a separate 'about' page? It takes up space between the list and the filters you can apply. Oh, you do, have a separate about page ("What's a Launch?"). Hmm, you need to update screenshots there. Oh, sorry there is a third description of what Launchly is in the footer when I press 'About Launchly'. Maybe all of these disparate descriptions can be combined?

Hmm, when I hover over vote up/down a pop-up appears which disappears before I can move my mouse pointer back over it. Sometimes I can get it to stay and perform an action - mostly I can't.

Additionally, I may be a little slower in this post-lunch state, but it isn't that clear to me at a glance what the site offers. Can I build a site using your tooling? Why do I need you to launch my creation?

Other question raised in my head: Why, for example, is 'Ask HN' not the best place to get feedback and exposure for my site?

Looking at your pricing - seems a little expensive for me. How can I be assured the reviewers are going to give me good feedback? Could I not better spend my USD 40 independently on specific feedback from my site's targeted usergroup?

On the whole, I like the site, it just feels a little disjointed here and there and the message of what you do is a little lost in the clutter.
The moon landing was all of the following things: a transcendent moment in the history of the human species;
a crash program of mostly symbolic importance;
undertaken with little thought about how to follow up;
fantastically expensive;
totally worth it;
unsustainable in the long run.

In the years since its Big Funding Crash, NASA has gotten good at robotic exploration, planetary science, launching satellites, and other interplanetary odd jobs that are impressive and important but less epic than the moon landing. They should keep doing what they're good at -- robotic exploration, space science, propulsion technology, etc.

But designing manned spacecraft that are safe and efficient at scale is something they've never really been set up to do. That job should be left to groups of people with the right incentives built into their organizational DNA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

Hopefully, they'll have more competition soon.
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1. Which government program isn't?

2. Is NASA really your #1 concern?
There are significant incentives for doing more with less. However, there is also a constant stream of new things to do which cost more money. It's more a case where the government only looks for effecency in areas it has been doing for a while.

So the Social Security Administration is lean. But, Nasa is a bloated cow.
It's not bytecode! There is no bytecode involved at all. It's just a representation of the source program text.

For example (in some pseudo-code):

a = x + 10

Perl 5 builds a tree from this (e.g. Assign(a, Add(x, 10))) and then executes it. Even the traversal of the tree proceeds according to the results of executing the program up to that point.

If we were to take the tree I generated above, we could get the exact same program out of it. I agree that this would be difficult with Perl - not because the parse tree is substantially different from the program text, but rather because it is ambiguous.

We could also target some arbitrary language. This is not the case in Perl, because it can't. The tree has absolutely no meaning other than that given to it through execution. It's not even an abstract syntax tree - it's just a parse tree! The semantics of the tree are exactly the same as the Perl code from which the tree was derived. And I don't mean "semantically equivalent", I mean, "identical by definition", because the source only has meaning because the tree is executed.

In a compiler setting, we can take an arbitrary (valid) program and give its meaning in terms of the target language. An abstract syntax tree has its own semantics, into which the original program text (or parse tree) is translated. The AST is given a semantics by a code generator, which translates constructs in the AST into constructs in the target language (which has yet another set of semantics).
Completely agree. The best framework is one you've built yourself IMHO.