skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His "quickly create a file" also adds text to it.
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Yes, but since Lua has been designed from the beginning to embed in a C program, its developers take the C API very seriously. (At the least, you can use Lua as a C library providing a great string/atom system, script & config file parser, and a garbage-collected Python-like repl for automated testing and debugging.)
I have just an alias for this (without the cd) in my ~/.bashrc:

alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias ....='cd ../../..'
alias .....='cd ../../../../'
PS3RSS: News Maker Lightning and Cloud : Separated at Birth?
You can also hit the volume buttons on the side to snooze it.
Youtube's 25 most viewed videos
Tracking your geolocation: Big Brother is Everywhere
Didn't read, too wide!
It was an almost entirely apolitical speech to children about personal responsibility, with points that apply to anyone starting something new, learning, or seeking inspiration.

I get a little discouraged by the quantity of political articles on HN and I'm an American. So I can appreciate the frustration non-Americans might feel.

But this is perhaps the wrong speech to take arms against.
The article mentions Apple as it had made the iphone and the app store out of thin air. It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true.

It is a pity Palm shooted itself after successful devices like Palm Pilot or Tungsten. Palm could have made the iphone. It had extensive experience in touch screen devices. It had previous endeavors in phone-pda hybrids like the Treo.

Palm could have made the jump, if only they haven't split in palm one and palm source and keep the good work on.

And the same story happens with Amazon Kindle and similar devices. I have been reading ebooks in Palm (thanks to plucker, great open source reader) for ages before ebook readers even existed.
Opera 10 Downloaded 10 Million Times In Its First Week
France Joins Germany In Google Books Protest
I'm not American, but I don't see anything particularly wrong with either of these assignments you mention. It kind of falls along the lines of the JFK speech "Don’t ask what your country can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for your country" in the first example.

Just because it specifically says the "president" shouldn't be a detractor in this regard considering the president is generally considered to be the leader of your country.

Also considering these lesson plans are written with regard to prekindergarten to 6th graders. I would imagine keeping the language in this simple way keeps the message clear for the children.
Because when you turn the iPhone off, it's actually off, not asleep. i.e. no processes running, no power to clock chips, etc.
"p2p scripting language" has been around for as long as I've been involved in the project. According to the Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.erights.org/ , it was added in November 2000.

The web site's approach hasn't really been redesigned in a long time. We're chronically short on people-with-spare-time-to-think-about-this-stuff, especially now that MarkM is working at Google (and previously doing a PhD). I myself don't have much spare time either.

I think Caja definitely has the greatest potential for mainstream adoption of object-capability+event-loop systems right now, but E is still the “designed for capabilities” language for me, and so I use it for most of my personal programming (data munging, generating my packing list, interactive this-and-that, etc) when I can, so that I can feed the experience back into the design/implementation work for E.

[Just registered on HN; this was the first thing I had to say important enough to bother for.]
Children have a remarkable capacity to learn and understand. Condescending, trying to shield them from 'difficult' concepts and abstracting away detail only harms them.
Google Patents Its Homepage
Yeah but remember like mail drops, telesales is a matter of numbers. We know that the success ratio is going to be shit but the labour is cheap and the gems are easily minable.

However if you're going to "sell a grand piano" your margin is higher and thus you can employ someone who has better sales techniques.

I agree that it is the same game as A/B techniques but there are degrees of viciousness at play here and the classic "piano salesman" is well towards the devious end.
This shouldn't be compared to a regular bike but to Segway. A popular electic bicycle would also be cheap and allow pedalling.
Adventures in Cardiology
The problem is that very tightly linked to that is "optimized for what?", and people and societies have different goals.

If people were ok simply talking about economics as a mechanism for optimization... that would be one thing, but these discussions pretty much always degrade on the internet.
I think it's a good thing that someone else can't call Amazon, pretending to be me, and convince their CSRs to brick my electronic devices.
Honestly, you know what the difference was? Sex appeal. Pure and simple. When iPhone came out, I had the flashiest PDA available. It had WiFi and I could do phone calls over VoIP and watch movies.

But man I dropped that thing like a J2EE Enterprise Hooker when the iPhone came out. I mean it's sleek and it's gorgeous and the fracking menus have momentum! Are you kidding?! Even the texture feels good, the glass plate is smooth. If ever there was a piece of tech that could get you laid, this was it.

That's why I got an iPhone. The fact that it had all those cool technical abilities and a great free SDK is just how I rationalized it to myself later.
Agreed, some languages are easier than others. Another one which is particularly easy is Ruby. And, with JNA in Java, it's even pretty easy in Java.
I submit this because it is a good and interesting read, and because it raises many points about the difference between being an industry specialist and using a new procedure and being the person on the receiving end of said new procedure.
And I do use rsync when I want to do a differential synch.

However, the tar solution works better for large file sets, and unlike using a simple `cp -rfp`, hardlink inodes are preserved.
It looks like it will have pretty much exactly the same problems the segway has. It is too expensive (~3,500 - 3,900 Euros). The range is too short (9-10km) and it doesn't go fast enough(edit: When finished won't go fast enough). It reminds me exactly of how the Segway origionally wanted to be, long distance and high speed, but regulations and batteries kept it from doing so. If they are going for a small niche then they might be fine, but if they are trying to mass market it, then it seems like it'll be another pipe dream. That's not to say I don't think its cool, just not at all practical.
According to the National Adult Assessment of Literacy, less than 5% of HS graduates are able to read proficiently. This means that they can't read well enough to compare and contrast the viewpoints in two different editorials, the sine qua non of democracy. (source: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...)

I don't get it. First all everyone here talks about is Malcolm Gladwell for three months, to the point where people keep complaining they are sick of it. And then less than a year later people have completely forgotten the message of that entire book.

Newsflash: You can't believe the thesis of Gladwell's book and also buy into the worldview that Obama is promoting here.

Don't get me wrong, personal responsibility is essential for success. But your number one responsibility is choosing a good environment to enable your success. If think the way to succeed is by being blindly obedient to a system with 5% literacy rates, that's a surefire guarantee you're going to be a failure in life.

This speech is really inspirational, but if you actually examine the underlying assumptions it's pretty clear that Obama is setting these kids up for a life of low-level wage slavery.
It's a bad idea to put methods on nil willy-nilly. I see stuff like this in Smalltalk projects all the time. People like to put < and > on nil and think they're clever because they fixed their little routine that does a sort. What they don't realize, is that they've possibly broken something else that depends on the Does Not Understand exception as part of its normal operation. (Yes, remember there's only one nil object, and you have no comprehensive list of what implicit contracts it has to fulfill in the rest of the code base. Certain proxy mechanisms can break. I know of another mechanism in one Smalltalk's streams that would break as well.)

The correct way to replace your nil checks with polymorphism is with the MissingObject pattern. Languages with explicit types should give you this for free. I think that even duck-typed languages should do this. (Every time you define a class Foo, you get MissingFoo automatically.) They can often be provided by libraries.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803209
I am, thanks for the link.

[edit]
That's absolutely amazing - youtube videos now load faster in my browser than they do in windows media player. Thanks again!
[EDIT added the word 'almost'] "almost entirely apolitical speech to children"

People at those levels of power don't do anything "non political".

I am not saying the content of the speech was political.
The content is just a bunch of pious homilies and feel good (== "heartwarming") statements. "Insight"? Hardly. Any politician anywhere addressing anation's kids would say similiar things.

The act of making this speech is (and so are the acts of people reacting against it). Else why is there so much political activity around this speech?

" with points that apply to anyone starting something new, learning, or seeking inspiration."

Arguably, the writings of Machiavelli or the teachings of Lao Tzu fit this need better.

Insight shminsight. Just shows he has a panel of good speechwriters, (as would be expected of any US president) and the ability to deliver a speech well, (which , again would be expected of a US president).

"this is perhaps the wrong speech to take arms against."

I am not "taking arms" against the speech. I am perfectly fine with politicians in any country making any manner of speech to their constituents/ citizens.

I am just disgusted with random speeches by American politicans (and the deaths of American senators) landing on HN with very tenuous connections to start ups or "the US affects the world" type statements made as a justification.

But hey, I have only one flag or downvote. I guess the "people" have spoken on this one.
Is internal database optimization a cure for performance bottlenecks?
The Encrypted Message left Unbroken since 1942
Because NilObject is actually an object, it is possible to add some methods that take some of the pain out of dealing with maybe-nil objects..

My favorite is the andand gem:
http://github.com/raganwald/andand/tree/master

It lets you turn code like this..

entry.at('description') && entry.at('description').inner_text

..into code like this..

entry.at('description').andand.inner_text
Yes, but an honest question from a non-American: Isn't that much/more/most/greater/grander of "everything" rather than over-the-top?

Over-the-top, to me, implies a taking something to-the-extreme-and-then-some, and it's in this latter phase of and-then-some where the essence of over-the-top-ness is happening, because it requires something new to happen. Making a building just more tall isn't any "new" it's "only" much/more/most/greater/grander of the thing that's already there.

Not that scyscrapers aren't impressive or anything and they are new in the sense that such thing haven't always been around.

To me, Pulp fiction has something of over-the-top-ness, but Rambo never had.
1. Check out z: http://github.com/rupa/z. It's a pretty nice productivity booster for flipping between different directories. It's quite easy to port to zsh, also.

2. Learn to use the editor modes on your shell. If you use Emacs mode in zsh, for example, things like transient-mark mode work with all the standard Emacs keybindings, and you can easily copy and paste pieces of your command line. vi mode also supports similar bells and whistles.

3. In zsh, if you are typing a command and then realize you need to look up its man page, move your cursor back to the command and hit Esc-h (or Meta-h or Alt-h, depending on your terminal). Once you quit the man viewer, your command line will be restored.

4. In zsh, if your command line gets too unwieldy to edit in zle, just hit Esc-e (Meta-e). It'll let you edit the command line in your editor (be sure your EDITOR environment variable is set).

5. zsh has an awesome buffer stack feature. Imagine you're typing a long command (call it command A), then realize that you need to run something else first (call it command B). Don't Ctrl-u or delete anything; leave your current command alone, and hit Esc-q. You'll get a fresh prompt. Run B. Once B executes, zsh will restore the command line from A. You can do this as many times as you want.

Anyway --- go and read "From Bash to Z Shell, Conquering the Command Line" by Kiddle, Peek, and Stephenson. I've never seen a better book on using shells with maximum efficiency (and I'm still only learning). Just learning to use and extend the autocompletion features of zsh was invaluable to me.
Except for Hong Kong, what are the success stories of colonialism?
Ask Y Combinator: Application for Winter 2010
My start up is a potential competitor to one of the start ups that is already a y combinator alumni. Does it make sense for me to apply for Winter 2010? Is there a conflict of interests for Y Combinator?

Thank you.
It's in axes, obviously.

You draw those X and Y according to them.
You've got to be kidding. Just some re-worded pabulum from the Little Engine that Could.
And would likely work, unless say, a few buddies happened to chat over beers and the subject of 'that crazy guy on the phone' comes up. The element of scarce information will then break some of the 'rules', negating much if any of hoped for strategy.

How so?

If they can collude on price then they can change the outcome of course, but for that its not enough for to all know what you are doing (you have after all told them all everything from the beginning, except what offers the others are making...) In order to collude, they have to know what you are doing, all agree on the same price, and they have to have all players in that market involved.

It could certainly done, but has little to do with knowledge and more about the ability for them to come to an agreement amoungst themselves and then stick to it.
deals with the physical world

Eek, don't like it. What is "the physical world"? Or rather, what isn't part of "the physical world"? It's just a matter of creating models for phenomena of increasing complexity.

Just as biology studies a set of phenomena emergent from enormous amounts of bio-chemical interactions, which are emergent from quantum physics, etc., economics is emergent from the psychology, beliefs, and interactions of people.
Or perhaps FriendFeed removed stats from their user agent?
Perhaps Python specific but I use this a lot

epy () {
cmd="import $1 as a ; print a.__file__.endswith('.pyc') and a.__file__[:-1] or a.__file__"
file=$(/usr/bin/env python -c $cmd)
echo $file
emacsclient --no-wait $file
}
Yikes, that thing will not sell. The core demographic that would use it are the same people that want to look the coolest. And I can't imagine anyone cool sitting on something as dorky.

Another good idea killed by poor design.
> I'd argue that the people supplying the funding are the customers

That definition is inconsistent with 'There can be something like a marketplace where the "customer" pays not with currency, but with their time.'

Charities, almost by definition, provide products/services to folks who can't afford the full cost of said products/services so the charity gets money from elsewhere.

Note that not all non-profits are charities.
Interesting possibility. How could we check that?
DTrace.
That sounds like how I wake up on the weekends, except mine is also normally shouting, "The sun is up!" He never seems to realize that I know, but don't care that the sun is up.
Is Skynet Your Next Start-up
If so, would you mind picking up a few safety tips from us first?

The Singularity Institute would like to offer Y Combinator's founders free admission to the coming Singularity Summit. This offer is good for the first 30 founders under age 30 to apply. It also also applies to the partners at Y Combinator even if it turns out that Paul Graham is older than 30.

The Summit consists of two days of the worlds best thinkers exploring science, technology, decision making, and the future of mankind. You can look at our line-up of speakers here.

http://www.singularitysummit.com/program

This is our first Summit outside of the Bay Area, and don't worry, we'll be back...
but the Singularity has become mainstream news lately, we have been written up in the Times, and now we're testing the waters in New York to test the hypothesis that the future isn't just for Californians anymore.
While we're here, I recommend you test the food (at and near the conference), the theater (really, culture is nice) and did I mention the food?

Be there! You'll save five hundred dollars and there's a very slim chance that a few decades down the road we'll have saved the world from your mad hubris and boundless ambition.
Equation for predicting ethnic violence
Article is predicated on the idea that evil and innovation are mutually exclusive. I think it's more true that evil and innovation are pretty tightly coupled.
7 hours? I'm jealous.
It doesn't look stable or durable.
Yes, you refer to many. I am too dumb to decipher that, can you name those many by numbers?
What exactly is incorrect in my assumptions about the screen:
is not 240x320 half the resolution of 480x320? Is not 16bit color space not as deep as 24bit? Did that HTC indeed have multitouch?

How did that WiFi work seamlesly? Connected on demand to the known networks in the backround, without need for you to do anything?
"Prety decent" can mean many things. But it does not mean that you could see the page looking exactly like it did on desktop. Not to mention JS and CSS support.
Regarding apps: I am not talking about installing the app once it is on your phone. That's zero clicks on iPhone. I am talking about the whole experience.
I think running a marathon in the first 3 hours of the day would be quite reasonable work.

But I sympathize, I am much more productive at night than the morning.
Also the -n and -P options to xargs. So you would do something like

$ find . -name 'blah*' |wc -l
2000
$ find . -name 'blah*' |xargs -n 250 -P 8 ./mangle

That'll spawn 8 copies of mangle, each with 250 blah files on its command line.
It mentions nokia, motorola and the other manufacturers as being unable to create such a innovative product like the iphone. It is not true.

So they did make one? If they did not, how is that not true?
> In an ideal world all consumption would be 'pull'.

In this ideal world, how do I find out about the existence of new products?
That looks like an excellent idea and very well executed. I really liked that it literally only took 1 click to vote (as opposed to usual where you have to click the radio input, and then click a submit button).

I have two suggestions for it:

1. Make it an embeddable javascript widget instead of an iframe. I think it would be more universally acceptable, and anyone could then simply use CSS to stylize the poll however they please.

2. I don't know if you do this already or not, but maybe track IP addresses of those who vote and geocode them onto a map or something. Comments usually have names to go along with them, it would be nice to have some sort of vague automatic identification to go along with the votes.
1-8

these apply to the US only.

9. Mobile devices were phones first and last, not usable handheld computers

Pocketpc and Palm phones were fully fledged handheld computers for years before. If you don't believe me check the list of apps at

http://www.smartphonemag.com/awards/winners_ppc_2005.html

10. Even the smartest phones didn’t have seamless WiFi integration

Maybe not seemless but functional. A search for 'wifi switching iphone' shows everything isn't perfect yet.

11. Without Visual Voice Mail, messages couldn’t be managed non-linearly

Don't know. Not really my thing.

12. There were no manufacturer owned and operated on-the-phone application stores as the sole source

True the app store is an innovation. It's a great idea apart from the compulsory part.

13. An on-the-phone store having 65,000 apps downloaded nearly 2 billion times was not on anyone’s radar screen

This is a repeat of 12. However it should be noted that there would have been 1000s of pocket pc apps available in 2006.

14-16

These are all basically about the app store. Pretty much repeating 12 and 13.

17. Buttons, keys, joysticks, sliders…anything but the screen was the focus of phones

There where popular touch screen which had only a few buttons. My recently retired HTC Magician (not Magic) was one of these.

18. Phones didn’t come with huge 3.5″ touch screens

Many Did. Some had bigger screens.

19. Pervasive multitouch, gesture-based UI was science fiction

Apple did bring many of these to market for the first time. I'm not sure if anyone had developed a phone intended to be used by hand as opposed to stylus. that said the stylus is pretty powerful in it's own right.

20. Actually usable, multi-language, multitouch virtual keyboards on phones didn’t exist

Deliberate repeat of multitouch. Apart from that many virtual keyboard existed

21. Integrated sensors like accelerometers and proximity detectors had no place in phones

'The first phone from the company to feature an accelerometer was the Sony Ericsson W910 and the Sony Ericsson K850.'

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

22. Phones could never compete in 3D/gaming with dedicated portable consoles

I had quake running on my HTC Magicician in 2006. There seemed to be a lot of other games available.

23. iPod-class audio/video players on mobiles didn’t exist

Many phones had popular music players.

24. No phone had ever offered a desktop-like web browser experience

Opera

25. Sophisticated SDKs and phones were strangers to each other

No. Wrong.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

so what are we left with

1. helped in the process of freeing US users from bad carrier slavery

2. The app store

3. A user interface designed to be used with fingers including multitouch and swipe.

Good achievements but they didn't 'invent' the genre. If you take away 1. You are left with an evolutionary not revolutionary contribution.
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HR 3200 (American health care bill) from a systems design perspective
I assume he was thinking of an area like web programming, where a DB mostly is the practical limiting factor for speed.

(Or rewriting the (often small) speed critical parts in C, after benchmarking.)
Yah that's a nice way to fix it as well, but I prefer to be able to continue using the "cd" command since it is burned into my brain.
"superficial inspection"

It's quite easy to get a professionally accredited car inspection for used cars in the UK. It doesn't cost a lot, and it means the buyer regains complete bargaining power.

Of course, it isn't economical to do this for very old cars, or for a lot of cars.
You dismiss many of the point on the ground "existed, but maybe not as usable".

That's exactly why iPhone became popular: because it made many of nice features actually usable for the John S. User, not only for John Geek.
What is BFS? I don't know and wikipedia is not much help. I think I can safely remove, "a revival of the 1970s British band Blackfoot Sue"

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