skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't see the comparison with respect to dating, this is sanctions against a media company on the basis they gave unfavorable coverage.

If removal from the list is 'sanctions' then what would you call not being included in the list at all? Should Twitter be forced to add all news sites to that list (and never remove them)? If so, what constitutes a 'news site?' Should all blogs be included in that list too?

Just because being on the Suggested Users List garners you a steady stream of new followers doesn't necessarily mean that once you are on that list Twitter is obligated to keep you there because you are now 'entitled' to keep that steady stream of new followers from now until the end of time. I will admit that there is a fine line when dealing with these issues, but removal from the Suggested Users List isn't that harsh... it would be different if Twitter banned their account or 'accidentally' screwed up their account beyond repair (forcing them to create a new account with a new name, possibly permanently losing a number of followers in the confusion). Or excluded TechCrunch's twits from search results or something similar.

{edit} Bringing this possible conflict of interests to light is a good thing but jumping up and down like the sky is falling and Twitter is the 'Evil Empire(tm)' is over the top and completely unnecessary {/edit}
NSTask when the Cocoa API fails you
Spot.Us Expansion Raises Question: What News Do We Value and Why?
502 Server Error when trying to set it up on the iPhone...
Sure makes sense. Any idea why clojure doesn't do automatic tail call optimization, and instead depends on recur?
Ask HN: What platform/product do u use for your blogs?
If you could list some of the reasons or <like>/<not like> would be greatly appreciated.

For all of you suspicious minds out there, no I am not creating another platform for blogs, I really do need one for my product.

Thank you !
DEMOfall09 - Gelato is online dating meets social search
Sorry for the nitpick, but if posting from here could it be TMOS, redefining the solution [Audio], kinda like we do for [video] or [scribd]? There's been a few links from this web site and I always think I'm about to read a white paper on the subject of digital audio. Not your fault, just a friendly request.
What's your issue with the title? We did manual memory management in the past and we do manual time management now.

I agree with him completely that managing the timing of parallel processes is the most pressing complexity issue in computing today.
The stock was really good quality(I ordered the ones printed on recycled paper). They are noticeably better than most other business cards.
You have spotted it.
The whole Agile movement and its practices, like pair programming, are driven and promoted by consultants who make money out of it.

EDIT Moreover, I am not sure whether the companies you mentioned really practice pair programming or they use it as a marketing ploy to impress they customers.
How we made FlexJobs into a subscription-based site
The problem is that lots of SEO information is presented as fact, when it's not. Near 100% of SEO is inferred based on anecdotal evidence. Google et. al. do not typically release their search ranking algorithms.

Like witch doctors, some of the things that SEO 'experts' do may work, but the reasons for it working are not always right and sometimes it's just the placebo effect (i.e. coincidence that you happened to also move up in the rankings around the same time or shortly after SEO changes were made).
Lookery Shuts Down and How to Move On
While most people who say this are simply setting themselves up for failure, sometimes you do need just a small amount of something (often cash) thats outside your reach to make this happen.

(Really this is on topic and not spam, we're not getting anything out of this). This is why we started the Awesome Foundation. When I say 'We' I mean people from Dorkbot, the founder of ROFLCon, the guy that runs Microsoft Startup Labs in Boston, the founder of DIY BIO, and Alexis of Reddit among others.

The Awesome Foundation gives away $1,000 grants each month to people who want to do something 'awesome'. It doesn't have to be a business. It doesn't have to be tech based. It doesn't have to be open source. It can be anything that's awesome. We take zero ownership or credit for it. We simply give away $1,000 to someone each month that needs a boost to make something truly awesome happen.

So far we've funded a giant hammock for 30 people in the Boston Common and a Visualization contest. If you'd like to apply check out http://awesomefoundation.org or @awesomefound on Twitter.

Please excuse this if you think its spam, but like I said- we get nothing from this and do it as a service to the community and it seems on-topic.
I dropped out of college (CS) instead, also because of an episode related to this.

An assignment for an exam was to make a simple library management program in pascal (cataloging books, leading, receiving them back etc.), mainly to test our understanding of pointers.

Even if we also had Macs at the university, we've been asked to make a command line app. But, since I was studying the Mac OS gui programming by myself, I made a graphical application instead.

The assistant professor that was evaluatings our assignment didn't believe that I had made it myself. She probably couldn't understand it herself (but, obviously, all the relevant functions were separated from the gui code). So she asked me to rewrite everything from scratch as a command line application in a couple of hours in front of her.

I managed to do it but I was really really pissed off. Shortly thereafter I started working and dropped out.
I worked with someone who never threw old code away. It was amusingly difficult to try to understand what his code did. Typically shitloads of php files that didn't do anything and in the files that actually did something stuff like

if (false) { ... large incomprehensible code block .. }

was common. Why comment out stuff when you can just disable it programmatically?
In the early web you were encouraged to add these things, but nowadays I think that the only reason that people end up still adding them is at the behest of SEO 'experts.'
A writer should use the most alive language available. Surely you are aware of what happens to people who go down the path of taking offense at common usage. Now that's degeneracy they ought to make movies to warn people about.

It's interesting that the nitpickers usually pick on informal language (slang) because that's where language is least encumbered by preconception. To try to reform society by purging usage is like telling characters on TV that they ought to do things differently: the show finished production before you even knew about it (and oh yeah, the characters can't hear you).

Language is marvelously protean. New currents and wellsprings are bubbling up all the time. They're considered ignorant and incorrect until they achieve critical mass. There's nothing to be gained, unless one has the ego of a schoolmistress, from moralizing about this. (On the other hand, I'd say there's a good deal to be gained by stripping down official language in the way that Orwell is known for.) Although I shouldn't be so hard on these people; they make great comedy possible.

By the way, you touched on a hobby horse of mine. The word "gay" is such a fascinating case. It's shifting its meaning again, from "homosexual" to "lame". The sensitive cultural critics behind South Park captured this perfectly in their line, "this is gayer than sex with men". What's fascinating is that this is happening just as our society is becoming tolerant of homosexuals at an astounding historical pace. It's as if the straight world is striking the following bargain: "you can get married, but we get the word 'gay'".
Good sales books for hackers?
bootstrapping a startup can lead pitching and selling services to developers. what books would you guys reccomend?
Actually from my experience with offshore companies, they often provide more certified developers and architects and they use this number or ration as a selling point. Sadly I cannot point to any source or statistic to support this.
* I would think that we'd be too afraid to try something like that during the cold war in fear of starting a legitimate war.*

Yes, but the system could be located in advance and disabled as part of a first strike. Even the vague details in the article would give an attacker a lot of ideas on how the system could be disabled -- apart from bombing the bunkers (which is difficult) you could spoof the sensors, or just convince the computer that it's still in contact with Moscow.

And even if the Americans can't find a way to disable the system, the fact that the Russians don't know that the Americans can't disable the system means that the Russians can't trust it any longer and so are back to being more likely to make a first strike.

The optimal solution is probably just to hint to the Americans that you might have such a system. Then again, you also have to assume that the Americans are clever enough to have figured out that you might have such a system anyway, so you probably don't even need to hint about it.

Gosh, Cold War game theory is fun. I wish I could travel back to the 60s and get a job with RAND.
I notice this pattern among my smarter friends, as well - when someone says something vague or badly defined, they try to understand the person's mindset, and clarify their ideas, instead of rejecting the faulty semantics they used to express them. One can always find semantics to argue about, and petty people usually do.
The best resource I've found was "The Unix Programming Environment," which goes beyond the C language and into using common libraries and organizing C projects with make and other tools.

Other than that, some food for thought on use of C in the real world is this article by Rob Pike, "Notes on Programming in C:"

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html
Pair programing is not for everyone. Like any other method. Pair programing is for motivated, enthusiastic and even addicted people. It is a different approach to the problem, which people must have curiousness, motivation and courage to try. Try together.

It cannot be forced or set up by the managers. It cannot be motivated by money. It is for passionate people, who have a desire to solve some problem or get things better together.

btw, Kent Beck's "Extreme Programming Explained" stats clear that it isn't a silver bullet and it didn't work alone. Only together with testing, planing, small changes and continuous integration. It is a part of collective effort.

And of course, passionate and enthusiastic people don't give a damn to things like halitosis when they're doing together that they really love to do.
These are C-style "#define" macros, not lisp-style macros. More here: [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=644956 ].
Gmail labs advanced imap controls lets you configure that. I'm not sure if it will work with this though.
Look at successful open source projects and read the source.
Indeed. The U-6 rate is now 16.8% (seasonally adjusted).

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
This sort of contradicts what I read before about the industry being hit at the same time by the recession + more access to free/pirated content.
Spaghetti code is not necessarily the result of fast thinking... shallow is enough... fast or slow.

However, fast thinking is necessary for playing out different versions of a solution inside one's head and generally for analyzing the suitability and elegance of one. That process is fast, internal and generally not conductive of talking. Just concentration and discipline. Also, verbalizing a thinking process is always a lossy compression. At least for me. And it's not because I don't know how to express myself, although I might not be very good at that either. It's because verbalizing a thinking process always feels like serialization of an inherently parallel and real time process. The mouth is a shared resource here.
You're right, I need to do that. I totally forgot that we even had mini profiles on here. I'll add my company on there.
Gelato brings real-time search to online dating
Emails are very slow to load on my iPhone, and my contacts still haven't synced. Kind of crappy really.

EDIT: It updated my contacts and email seems to be working alright after about a half hour or so. I assume Google is just getting slammed by iPhone users at the moment.
Oh, then my mistake, I guess.
The first reply at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/... goes into pretty good detail from the language designer.

The short version is that it's a limitation in the JVM currently that he's hoping is removed some day.
Nope, it's just an overloaded name. They're both intermediate representations for programs, but entirely different in their approach.
My personal uneasiness with certifications is partly due to the fact that so many people in IT organizations were fired without credentials. There are technical or college or even graduate degrees in subject related to what needs to be done in IT. It is just sad that after ignoring them for so long, they now turn to these commercial offerings who often don't focus on the real problems at hand in the sense that the problem is rarely technical.

That and also that several people (and I don't want to generalize because they aren't all like that) I have met with such certifications have belief that there is a "one true way" or recipe of doing things and are uneasy to adapt or step out of this course. Maybe it creates in these people the false conviction that there is an infallible answer to all problems.
Wait, didn't "Really Simple Syndication" start out easy? Isn't that the point?
AT&T Decries Net Neutrality "Bait and Switch"
Consider http://code.google.com/p/google-jstemplate/

"Simple and robust browser side template processing for Ajax based web applications"

While this isn't a macro processor, it actually solves a related problem of management and separation between data (javascript, json) and presentation (html)

Here are the slides: http://google-jstemplate.googlecode.com/svn/slides/jstemplat...
When Geeks get Political: Geeks on a Plane in DC
VistaPrint is good enough for Japanese salarymen. And we know our business cards. Caveat: after you're on their customer list expect to be upsold to, with a vengeance.
Also, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836283 if you're in NY and want to demo next month!
When I look at my code, and I see the beginnings of something bad, I ask myself: "Could someone else understand this in two months? Will I, when it breaks?" Then I go back and fix it. Whereas in pair programming, two people will likely look at each other and say, "Oh yeah, that's an obvious workaround! Let's keep going!"

Really? In this context, I find that I'm the one who often says, "will someone understand what this is doing when they see it the first time?" When it's just me, I may not stop to consider that POV.
That's a worthy goal. Hopefully it can be rewarding in many ways (including financial return on your investment in addition to a sense of satisfaction).

I'd encourage you to aim for something that can 'go big' in terms of employing many many people. One that can potentially attract assistance (be it public or private), and something that leverages local skills. Try to find some arbitrage.

Example: perhaps investigate whether there is an in-sourcing opportunity by hiring Californian IT people and running American call centers with the best of silicon valley answering the phones. It's unpatriotic not to use them. Ok, silly idea.

Most jobs seem to have been lost in retail, construction, manufacturing etc. Perhaps start with the people you want to help most?
Ah, guess I didn't see it because of flashblock.
When Geeks Get Pregnant (w/ twins)
The "birth-death" model does overestimate employment - just take the example of the fellow who posted at the top of this thread. Laid off yesterday, starts a new software venture today. 0 income. And probably won't have any income for a few months at least...

So yes, new businesses are probably being born at a rapid clip just because people don't have any other options for employment at this point, so why not start something? But the vast majority of those businesses being started now won't show any income for many months... and many of them will just go under (as is always the case).
I wonder if this is related to the fact that my Blackberry hasn't received any of my Gmail messages since this morning
I was talking about when the app terminates and all the memory is released back to the OS. Not while the app is running.
Some successful open source projects have dreadful source, though.

There are several threads on HN recommending source to read. (Off the top of my head, I'd recommend the source for Lua and OpenBSD's userland utilities.)
SPJ's not a member of the top CS theorists?
The Secret of Object#to_s
Thats incredibly insightful and thoughtful advice. You're right, I do know about 37signals and Fog Creek (and do read their blogs).

To be honest, I didn't originally come up with the idea for the website, I was just asked to write it because the two people who did don't know how to program.

I think what it really needs is a way for businesses to make their profiles personal so when a prospective consumer/customer sees them, they're drawn in.

Again, thanks for your comments. I'll pass them along.
And the base configuration must be this one:

"One dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series-based workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support"

So I basically get a regular workstation for $8k ?!
I use Jekyll for http://solutious.com/blog. I like it b/c it's a static site generator so the site itself is just a bunch of files (no database, etc...). Jekyll is also integrated into GitHub so the site itself is built and hosted on their servers. All I have to do is push my commits.
Like what? Memcache is written in C, right? Python itself?

Anyone actually follow this method want to chime in?
His research has nothing to do with what is considered CS theory in the US and Canada.
Have you got much besides straw-manning what I'm saying and proof by personal assertion?
>Some successful open source projects have dreadful source, though.

Still a good learning experience, but yeah, it would be preferable to choose something well known for quality code. I learnt a lot from programming an apache2 module. Supposedly the apache code isn't the best C project available, but there are some interesting real-world aspects of it.
I like this part: "Template meta-programming is a great example of people being clever without being responsible."
The Zen of Geeky Boat Projects
I've found some books like Maguire's "Writing Solid Code" and McConnell's "Code Complete" to be helpful, but your best resources are probably the source code to systems similar to your definition of 'real'. Depending on this definition, I'd suggest looking at the source for SQLite (compact and rock solid), Apache (customizable request handling), Perl (for polymorphic data types), and Linux (a big modular system). Basically, pick any of the open source tools you use, and see how they've solved the problem you are interested in!
Posterous - great eamil interface, effortless blog creation and updating and the Share on Posterous widget rocks
It bounces me. I don't want to have to hand in payment information to even take a look at a product before I can use it.
The Palm Pre does this nicely already. I wonder if there is some sore of licensing situation that is preventing Apple from implementing multiple exchange accounts or Apple just doesn't think that their customers need multiple accounts.
Visualizing Real-time Social Structures at TC50
The article provides 10 reasons why pair programming might not work. Moreover, it says that these reasons are very common:

10. Most software managers...
9. Most software shops...
8. Most software shops...
7. Most software shops...
6. Most software people...
5. Most software shops...
4. Most software shops...
3. Most software developers...
2. Most software developers...
1. Most software shops...

Do you see the pattern: most pair programming attempts, if they happen, fail, because of "Most of the...".

You write: "most of the people who have tried pair programming like it". Your conclusion is contrary to one of the the article.
Look Ma, no hypervisor
Protect Your Eyes From Your Computer
dude, it's iTunes. (seriously. it's like reading a name literally versus the immediate brand and big-picture recognition of seeing a logo.)
im sorry, but this realtime stuff is like web 2.0 overhype on steroids. There's a lot of great products that will come out of it, but there will also be a lot of WTF is going on here products as well.

"it's like friendfeed for dating". People usually go on dating sites to get laid and/or find soulmates, I don't think need real time dating search will make that happen more efficiently.
It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin...

I hadn't realized that someone identified some of the raters in the previous contest with their imdb ratings:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

(I hope it's not bad form to reply to myself.)

edit: Also, why this matters, page 44 of a research paper (PDF):
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006
an interesting article in similar vain: niklaus wirth's "good ideas, through the looking glass".
Still, obviously there are some reasons why web sites rank higher than others. Just because some/many people claim wrong things, doesn't prove the opposite.
Lua is often recommended, but the one I've seen the most praise for is SQLite.
I imagine you'd get the most utility out of looking at the source of a system doing something similar to what you're trying to build.
Direct, but great at getting to the point.

If you are about to do your own startup, read this. It's quick to read (but will take a while to really impact how you think).
It's a Nehalem Beowulf cluster; the same thing everyone else is selling.
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig....
Using Vim and Snipmate with Django
Parenscript already provides macros. You can write in parenscript and output a .js file.

Example usage (taken from the mailing list):

1. standard with-foo macro

(with-elements-by-ids (mydiv (other "otherdiv"))
(setf mydiv.inner-h-t-m-l other.inner-h-t-m-l))

2. multiple-value return in javascript

(defun divmod (a b)
(return (values (/ a b) (% a b))))

(receive (div mod) (divmod 10 3)
(debug (+ "div: " div ", mod: " mod)))

Since JS has true closures and a flexible object model (someone wrote a CLOS-y layer for it recently) there is no need to take the JSR way and try and push for a community-accepted broken macro system. Besides, as someone (Jason Dominus?) posted to the perl list, lisp macro's are regular and do not break, unlike every other proposal that uses infix syntax.
This is pretty good actually, because one thing that always bothered me about previous articles that said the same thing, was that those articles didn't have any concrete examples of how you might implement a class hierarchy instead of a conditional. This one has exactly that, good work.
Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome
When do programming books lose value?
Thanks for linking to the talk, it was very thought provoking. And, by what I see, adds more support to the article's conclusion.
Neither my wife or myself have been able to keep a single call up for an entire conversation here in Chicago. This includes downtown, north side, by the lake, etc. Conversations from iPhone -> iPhone are always garbled.
Is there a way to access this without having to login to google docs?
Is "upsold to" a fancy way to say "spammed"?
Seattle Startups and Jobseekers mixer on 9/30 @Jobnob PSN Happy Hour
Watching Yahoo's Transformation
Part of running a business is paying the associated costs. Training new employees is an expected cost of running a business, so take it out of your end. Doesn't seem like a particularly outrageous idea...