skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I had this on my cell phone - most links I want to open in Opera Mini, but there's a few that I would rather use Skyfire or Pocket IE for.
And after a long enough time searching, you just gave up and added or subtracted one from the variable?

Don't pull that trick in my shop. Isolate your bug and fix it. Whatever is causing it is probably causing other bugs that will affect other people, including the poor sucker who has to clean up your mess.
How to identify thoughts that you could have had using a game.
Consider the following game where players match social news submissions with submitters.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796541

As Tichy mentioned in the discussion, this might be fun with Twitter.

In a way, Twitter allows you to read people's minds. This game would allow you to see what others think you are thinking about.

And so you might be able to identify thoughts that you could have had from this game data.
Google's extensive testing does not preclude the possibility that their design sucks. The original "simplicity" of their service was entirely accidental; if I'm not mistaken Sergei either didn't know enough html or didn't care enough to bother making it any more complicated.

Religiously testing will only lead to a local maximum and ignores the possibility that the design may have not been great to begin with.

Google's homepage is not even remotely close to the standard a highly competent minimalist designer would offer. Little attention to detail, remedial typographical choices, a 90's looking poorly executed Logo, random UI elements with no clear purpose. It's very much like an engineers interpretation of what a minimalist designer would do.. which is exactly what it is.

All of their products are on the utilitarian end of minimalist design and could stand to be improved significantly from an aesthetic perspective without actually changing the interface noticeably.
Considering that Joshu was a famous Zen master, perhaps I should defer to your judgement.

I will say that in my own life, I am often tempted by immediate action or inaction that suddenly becomes unattractive when I remember my longer-term goals.
Bill Gates: Solving the Toughest Problems in CS [video]
PAIP is a good book, but personally, my mind was blown more by SICP and On Lisp. Both of those had more unique content and "lisp magic".

When I can find the time, I want to read Purely Functional Datastructures. Clojure and PFD are the first major advancement that I've seen since my college Intro to Datastructures class.
He refers to the known floating point rounding error. You should not expect a 'new coder', as he put it, to trully understand floating point rounding errors because to understand it, you need to already be a coder with some experience.
I'm not an Obama basher but there's no way he (or Sen. Durbin for that matter) can talk about the new 'entrepreneurial spirit' in America that's leading us out of the current economic malaise and then point to his home state.

No politician in Illinois has ever met a tax s/he didn't like -- and passed into law. The state budget is a mess, underwater by 11.5B, the governor was recently impeached for attempting to sell a vacant Senate seat, the City of Chicago is selling off it's expressways and parking meters for immediate cash, in Cook County we have some of the highest sales taxes in the nation, that budget is underwater too and state pensions pay more money to retirees than was paid to them during employment.

Now look at 37Signals -- they're a great company, in the city, hard-working, focused, and making money. They're tough-minded business people and for me, an inspiration to keep working hard on my idea.

But I have no illusions -- the risk in Chicago is always entirely your own.
I was at the JVM Language Summit yesterday and went to the session by the developers of Noop. Indeed, it has not been "delivered" - though they have a working "Hello World", the syntax of the language has not yet been finalized, nor have they begun work on a compiler that emits JVM bytecode.

The developers work at Google on their internal tools team, focusing particularly on unit testing. Hence, the inspiration for a language that's like Java but with Guice (Google's DI framework) and without the ability to shoot yourself in the foot in the ways that Java makes it particularly easy to.

Noop is a 20% time project for the developers. So, there's a tacit endorsement by Google, but it's not as if Google has staffed up a full-time team to deliver a new language that will be used throughout their organization any time soon. The developers don't expect to get much adoption for Noop, and hope that it will mainly influence people's thinking and other tools.
I built a prototype of something like this for the Mac OS X Cocoa text system several years ago - I called it "TextShapeView", and I was intending to make it into a Cocoa text system plugin (InputManager) so you could pop up this view next to any TextView in any program. I might have gotten further with that, but I can't remember.

Here's a blog post with details, links, and a screenshot:

http://michael-mccracken.net/2009/09/textshapeview/

The code is hosted at http://leverage.sourceforge.net/ , where there are a few other text system hacks that I did a few years ago - one of my favorites showed a hierarchical outline view next to any text view that would show the nesting of any kind of simple syntax, and let you move the selection around by selecting in the outline. It is unfinished but still pretty useful.
I've seen these systems and I think they can be good for teaching programming.

Basically, they force the student to think about the whole problem at once, design a complete solution, and implement it without making mistakes. If you screw up, you'll have a very tough time finding the mistakes, since the system doesn't tell you where the mistake might be. It prevents you from repeatedly patching your system rather than redesigning it, which is a big problem I see in a lot of programmers.

It's not good for the absolute beginners, but for people who know a little bit how to think about algorithms and data structures, and are trying to improve their code quality, it seems like a good exercise. I know I've had some rewarding experiences debugging code by thinking about it; using a debugger, while easier, seems generally less satisfying.
This isn't good advice. It's self-gratification.

You have work to do. Do it.

Sitting at the terminal, but not sure what to type? Turn off the terminal, grab your source listings, scratch pad, and red and black pens and go to the other room. Or the library, Or starbucks. Work the problem that way and soon enough, you'll be dying to get back to the terminal.

Sitting on the sofa and analyzing that function with pencil and paper until you've worked yourself into a logic freeze? Get up and turn on your computer and code the simplest case. Before you're done, you'll find some enlightenment.

Have trouble doing either? Review old code, examine apps written by others, refactor something (you always have something to refactor, right?).

But do what you feel like? No.
I think it's a matter of perspective. Obviously a product that has a large open source volunteer base will be more secure because of their ability to mobilize against security threats. So the City of Vancouver is Open, but not Open Source because they are not allowing masses amount of people access to change things. I guess you could say that if we could real time vote to change city decisions, then it would be open source.
The Most Useful Rope Knots for the Average Person
I've got a project for python by the same name. It's pre-alpha still, but I'd be happy to support anyone who wanted to use it. I had someone contribute some bug fixes a month or so ago:

http://github.com/jeffjenkins/mongo-mapper
The site looks wrong on safari 4.0.3
http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/
Google "bought", didn't they?
philosophy = physics without the math

Do the world a favor and stick with hacking: build something.
Why we skip Photoshop when mocking up websites
It depends who you ask what the big difference b/w Smalltalk and Lisp is.

Model-driven architecture weenies like me will tell you the biggest difference is methodological, and that real-time object-oriented systems engineering has its roots in most of Kay's ideas.

I'm not sure what you mean by the following:

@Lisp systems tend to use compile-time abstractions Lisp->machine code->execution

I don't think so. The whole reason I enjoy Lisp is for how it has inspired me to do streaming models of compilation. When you're updating things dynamically, the most important thing is to have a logical object model - starting with getting your "(UML) package diagram" correct. Otherwise you end up with a large system that requires the entire system to be locked up for minutes while you do the upgrade, because different parts of the system depend too much on physical model details. That's why you separate message from method. So you can do this in any language, some easier than others.
I worked on the Word App (specifically, the viewing side of things rather than the editing side) so I didn't use the OneNote app that much. But I did play with it a little, and from what I saw it has the same core functionality as the rich client. Not sure about the fancier stuff like Outlook task integration. But it's certainly the case that you'll be able to create notebooks, sections, and pages, and take notes as you normally would.

Sorry that's not a great answer - I'd never used OneNote before this summer and I still don't know all the features even in the rich client, so it's hard for me to say if the web app is equally "flexible".

> it's a great app but it never made a lot of sense for me since I use a lot of different machines).

Isn't there a way, even in Office 2007, to share a notebook across multiple machines? I haven't used it but when you create a new notebook you have to pick either "I will use it on this computer", "I will use it on multiple computers", or "Multiple people will share this notebook". I imagine that might fill your current need.
Some Claudio Stampi made some research on this. His findings are summarized in a hard-to-find, expensive book:

"Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep" (1992)

http://tinyurl.com/n86q3d
ok, well iTunes sales were $3.34 Billion in 2008. That's over double the combined RIAA figure of album and singles sales. http://tr.im/yZ7K I remember reading that Apple doesn't take a large cut of that amount if that even mattered here, so sounds like these figures are wrong, especially when other online music retailers are taken into account.
I wonder whether "powershell" will go anywhere. For many I get the impression that command line means Unix. However Microsoft's ability to partner with hardware vendors could lead to a new way of seeing the command-line. Although I have my doubts.
I just append something to my Gmail address with a plus character. Like: myaddress@gmail.com might become myaddress+hackernews@gmail.com. I can then set up filters to sort or delete specific sources of mail.

According to Wikipedia, this is called "sub-addressing".
Posterous releases blog themes
I had to learn a lot of these knots for rock climbing (and their numerous variations) and I find myself using them in 'normal' life too. Knowing a few crucial knots (learn the bowline and a few variations, seriously) is a great skill to have.
"You should not expect a 'new coder', as he put it, to trully understand..."

Oh, but I do. If you don't understand it, figure it out. If you still don't understand it, ask. If you still don't understand it, sound the alarm, and we'll both sit down and figure it out together. And you will learn it.

But please don't use "newness" as an excuse to leave shit behind. Excellence comes from doing excellently, whatever it takes.
Also, they're testing Hello World. IMHO that makes the tests close to meaningless.
I stopped reading at "Rob Enderle."
I like the sentiment but this does not really work for us "normal" (non-self-employed) folk. If I sleep/work/eat/learn whenever I feel like it then something will surely suffer.
You might be able to find the answers this over on board game geek http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/181
I'll give you a little secret: they let us engineers read whatever books we darn well please. We can also go to coffee houses and drop names of French intellectuals while finger snapping to beat poetry.

We just pretend to be totally square so that nobody notices we can actually be employed while doing this.
Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) 2010 Demo Download
This reminded me of a great quote of John Carmack, which says the opposite:

Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
Agreed. I'm learning it now, and while there are some new ideas in the concurrency model, it doesn't strike me as hard to learn or use the way (say) Haskell and C++ are. There's a fairly small number of core elements, and the language design as a whole strongly encourages you to make things loudly crash when anything is wrong, rather than passing on corrupt data. That helps immensely with debugging...

Also, I found that a lot of concepts from Prolog carry over nicely. Erlang was initially implemented in Prolog, and that's where it gets pattern matching and immutable variables from. (Along with several stylistic / syntactic quirks.)
The reason why I used "hello world" is two-fold

#1. because it's what Bret from Friendfeed used in his testing
#2. it tests the core framework code, anything more is testing code I write.
Not sure if I should take this is as a compliment to me, or an insult to Paul Graham.
Site's not loading for me. Anyone have a cache?
I was pretty interested to read this, but there's no content here. The author doesn't explain why he switched to windows 7, besides that it's "more fun". No specifics.
Yeah, for some people, the advice in this article will lead to disaster. For example, I would rather be reading than doing, all the time. Reading is pure candy for me, instant gratification. To become (reasonably) successful, I had to stop reading.
I did 2 years of general ed and CS courses a community college before transferring back to a 4-year state university.

Our CS courses were at night, taught by a professor who worked full-time as a software engineer. I'm not knocking PhDs who go directly from student->professor (I had some great professors after transferring), but there's something to be said for learning from someone who has real-world experience.
Posterous Adds Theme Support; Continues To Grow
Friends for Sale: What is a Facebook friend worth?
NP. Really, this is where you hopefully have the rest of your business figured out. If you want to target corporate IT, free probably won't work. But you could do a freemium, or an ad-supported site (prob. not a good idea; people won't like seeing ads show up on "their" documents...)

If you've done your customer discovery, validation, and profiling correctly, you should be able to answer this question by stepping through the use cases of each of your example users. If you haven't done that stuff, I highly recommend running to Amazon.com and picking up Steve Blank's "4 steps to the epiphany" book. It'll help, a TON, with figuring out exactly what your company and product is.
Yup, imitating Microsoft from the beginning ;)
Oh! An interesting consideration! I didn't realize song couldn't get on air unless it was pressed!
"Value of units shipped from 1973 to 2008"
I don't think people mean "Don't even try" when they say "absolutely not." It's a colloquial expression, not a scientific expression.
>Of course, actual conversations consist of me yakking about over-the-top technical details

What you need to do is go into why they care.

Then they listen VERY carefully.
Zune HD Apps from MarketPlace
You can pop the web app out of the SkyDrive interface, and the ribbon is minimize-able just like in Office.
My easy (if extremely unpopular) fix:

You can only submit your code for a given assignment a maximum of N times, where N is appropriate to the assignment difficulty and the level of the class. Then you can't pursue a haphazard "try this? nope, didn't work" strategy, and you have to reason out your program correctly on your own without appealing to the black box.

Alternately, if you wish to be less draconian, simply deduct points for every incorrect submission.
That's unfortunate, but my team builds the web apps, not the Office website. And the web apps do officially support the latest versions of Safari and Firefox.

All I can offer about the Office site is that it works perfectly in Opera 10, including the Silverlight video. :p
See http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation#running-tornado-in-p... . FriendFeed uses nginx as a reverse proxy to run several instances of the Tornado web server process. Each process has its own GIL.
I think jcw's point was that while vim has these features, no additional features are really required.

I interprete the exchange this way:
question "how does it stack up".
answer: "meets minimum bar".
Thanks! Do you know if they are using data from their own servers or if they are just pulling it from the web on the fly?
Finally. Seriously, I've been waiting literally months for this. So long I switched to tumblr in the end, sadly...
I don't understand why would people en masse download only one song from album. The rest have to be a real crap.

I can sometimes listen to a single song without looking at the rest, but that account for something like 5% of my listen, the staple being albums, of course.
The Sublime appears to be down for me :(
Yeah I'm sure everyone has their own opinions on how to solve this problem (scaling in general), this is just my approach. I'm sure your approach is just as, or more, valid.
This is great! Thanks! I spent some time trying to learn how Cocoa's text system works and this should help quite a bit. Also, I'll try to include something like this in MacVim.
One important thing is we are all so different even though we share same commonalities. So you have to make that chose and the best advice in the world might not suit to you.
According to the Tornado documentation, FriendFeed runs many instances of the Tornado server. If the number of server instances is greater than the number concurrent requests, then there's no problem with blocking calls. I personally find synchronous code easier to write/debug/understand than Twisted deferred.
Monetizing Networks
Evolution doesn't work that quickly.

And additionally, humans have a vast ideological landscape that is "contagious" among individuals, which also happens to limit breeding. This is not something evolution can control through reasonable means.
I read the text. My point is there is no visual aid to help you come to definitive conclusions like "Between 1999 and 2002 we see an exponential decline in cd sales." You can guess but that's about it.
Ask HN: What are your favorite techniques for driving viral growth of a website?
The essence of viral marketing is making one customer sell to the other.

Here are some well-known examples:

1) Photo-tagging on facebook. Tagging is the primary means by which photos are made social: when a user uploads a photo, they can “tag” their friends who appear in the photo. Notifications are sent to tagged friends letting them know that a new tagged photo of them exists on Facebook, and feed stories are published on both the tagger’s and taggee’s profiles.

Users who receive a notification that they have just been tagged usually investigate the photo. If they don’t want to be associated with the picture, they “detag” themselves from it. Similarly, users who see a feed story about their friends being tagged in photos often check out the photo.

2) Asking a new user for permission to automatically send invites to all of their GMail contacts. When you register for twitter, you have the option of allowing twitter to automatically log-in to your GMail account and send out invites to all of your contacts.

3) One of the earliest known examples of viral marketing on the web was HotMail. Every email message that you sent from HotMail included a signature inviting the recipient of the email to join HotMail.

4) PayPal was another early example of viral marketing. With PayPal, you could send money to anyone with an email address -- even if they were not a PayPal user. However, in order for the recipient to claim their payment, they would have to open a PayPal account.

What are your favorite examples of viral expansion loops on the web? Have you used any of these techniques yourself?
Generally, "command line" means Unix because it refers to the whole ecosystem of pipelines and composable utilities such as grep and gzip. Unix provides support (spawning new processes is cheap, buffering stdin/stdout between a whole chain of programs is handled once at the OS level, etc.) that Windows programs are stuck without or forced to re-implement themselves in userland. Since Windows doesn't provide that kind of infrastructure, programs tend to become large and centralized, with one GUI interface and (maaaaybe) a secondary command-line interface, rather than a set of smaller utilities that interface primarily via the command line, and (sometimes) have a GUI frontend.

While Windows could get a useful command line interface, the whole design of the OS works against it.
One of my previous roommates wouldn't wake up if there was a garbage truck inside the room. Nothing short of hitting him would do the trick. That's another idea for an alarm clock.
New micro startups geared to revenues in recession
Novice players will overextend themselves and in this case the first player might have an advantage, otherwise I don't see it.
oh sorry i followed this link from techcrunch, i guess the right one is http://www.officelive.com/
I don't know if that's entirely true - it's tough to tell without including 'illegal' dowloads in this chart, which is equally difficult to accurately measure against the RIAAs sales data.

However, it is very interesting to not how Vinyl, Cassettes and CDs all dovetail into each other nicely. I would be willing to bet that the rise of mp3 downloads and the decline of CDs would dovetail equally as well.

The problem was, I think, the mp3 wasn't a media format invented by/for the music industry.
I found it curious that there's an ad unit on the onenote product page http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx .
just noticed it supports tumblr themes. how clever is that? A+
That's not flash. That's swf files.

Flash, as something you hire developers for, is an authoring environment. As of CS3, it is not very compatable with Flex.

CS4 actually as adobe tying them together a lot better, but I've yet to put enough time in on CS4 projects to know one way or the other how well they have.

While you may think of flash as "that which runs on a flash player", a vast majority of people developing software in this arena think of it as "that which is written with the component of Adobe Creative Suite 3/4 called Flash Builder"
In an ocean of Internet startups, these nine stand out