skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If those are the columns this isn't 'precise' postal code data. The log/lat is just the 'centroid' of the postal code. At least in the US, most -- if not all -- postal codes are irregularly shaped, so it's not like you can pull up precise GPS data on the perimeter of the postal code (i.e. in order to draw it on a map).
Your second point makes sense only if everyone who reads your code only does so in your preferred IDE. That kind of tool dependence is unhealthy.

For myself, I rather like things like the prepended underscore (or m_*, the microsoft convention for object members) because it makes up for a shortcoming of C++ and its derivatives: there are multiple non-local scopes for symbols, and it's not always obvious which one you mean. Is that unbound variable a class member? static class member? top-level member of a namespace? global? Having prefixes that make this obvious can be really helpful.

Now, that's secondary to the point of whether this scoping rule is a good idea. I'm generally of the opinion that it's not, and that languages (e.g. python) which force object scoping to be explicit are more readable. But that's just because "self.field" is 1:1 with the "_field" convention from C++.
One of my favorites for quickly copying a directory between hosts is...

dsthost# nc -l 1234 | tar -xvzf - -C .

srchost# tar -xzf - . | nc dsthost 1234
This is definitely worth sharing. The IT department and the computer lab guys are worse than the Soviets. They keep all these strict quotas, you have to wait in line for anything to get done, and the applications they run are old (unless they're Microsoft or Adobe applications).
<i>(McDonald's being the equivalent of Java)</i>

Is this true, or is it something you want to be true. I would say its a disservice to the language which in many ways was better than its peers and has since been imitated a lot (VMs, Javadoc, Parts of the platform library).

The tools in terms of breadth and quality available for java (IDEs, testing, decompiling, AOP ... etc.) are years ahead of most other platforms. (Excluding C#, what else...?).

A large part of this is due to the simplicity of the language (and the stability). Is java worse if you are developping in Vim, no doubt, but this is a strawman. With the tools vs. python|ruby|lisp is a different proposition entirely.
I rewind and hear this remark again and again. Because the Sharks seemed to be taken aback a little after hearing it. But I didn't quite understand this remark. Can somebody please explain to me?
'Useful' information could be the ability to do a 'what postal code am I in now' query based on your current GPS coordinates. Or to pull together your own 'postal code map.'

Usually postal code data isn't that accurate though. The Long/Lat information is usually just a point in the 'center' of the postal code and most postal codes are irregularly shaped.
Cloud to Rescue Government from Evil Data Centers
I found the article rather sensationalistic, but one of the comments rings true with regard to globalization of knowledge work in general:

"...you end up with a barbell distribution – a bunch of those rare people who can work through systems they’ve never seen before and fix them at the top, and a bunch of people to act as interchangeable cogs at the bottom..."

If you cannot quickly add value to systems & technologies you've never seen before, you're probably a depreciating commodity. IBM is merely riding this wave.
He's mad that even though the government is administering a massive Keynesian stimulus as are a lot of others right now, including China, unlike those countries none of it seems to be routed towards solar power eagerly enough to create a big market for it here, and the resultant manufacturing jobs. So if you decide to bet the farm on solar and cover the roof of your house/commercial building with panels, you'll have to import them which negatively affects our balance of trade - even if you want to buy an American brand like AM.

I personally don't have a manufacturing fetish, but a lot of people are deeply worried about the comparative advantage in cheap labor that exists in China and neighboring countries, because not so long ago you could make a good living and provide for your family with a skilled labor job in an American factory, and many of those jobs have evaporated or been devalued as manufacturing has been exported.

There is not as much money in service work and IP creation doesn't involve as many people as manufacturing, so there's a lot of quite skilled and hard-working people who are unable to get decent and dignified work. A young or single person can easily contemplate relocating to an area of greater economic activity, but if you're middle-aged and have a family that may not be a practical option. This is reason there are so many crappy little web development and design companies out there, people who saw the change coming in time have tried to switch towards digital manufacturing with varying degrees of success. But many feel there's a lot less money in digital development than in physical manufacturing - after all, physical manufacturing doesn't employ just factory works, but machinists, construction workers, truckers, truck builders and so on.

Think of it like the dustbowl agricultural failure that led to mass migration during the great depression, but with factories instead of farms. If employment doesn't recover within the next 12 months, there will be a great deal of pressure after the 2010 elections for punitive tariffs on imports a la Smoot-Hawley, which will include computer equipment since most of it is manufactured in Asia. Outsourcing will continue apace, not least because it's currently absurdly cheap to ship the stuff from there to here, exacerbating the problem.

Outsourcing manufacturing has been very good for consumers and I feel that evolving towards a more globalized economy is a Good Thing, but while large wage differentials persist it's very destructive of small-scale wealth that depended on wages from local manufacturing. Most people are not, and don't want to be, entrepreneurs, and are angry because they invested a lot of hard work in building up their family's capital only to see their 'business model' (work hard, get paid) shredded.
Hjertemassage og kunstigt åndedræt- video
It's a bit different. Your metaphorical factory isn't making cheaper widgets by taking tiny pieces of your competitor's widgets away from them.

I'm not arguing for or against high frequency trading, just saying that finance actually is a zero sum game unlike manufacturing.
I find it quite sad to watch Adobe losing the last vestiges of its hacker roots (Geschke and Warnock were great engineers) and its high-quality graphics roots, as it becomes The Flash Company.

(Especially since I knew Geschke a bit back at their start-up time. Was almost the 9th employee. ;-)
Google Rumored to Buy Brightcove For $500-$700 Million
My point is that you can't draw conclusions about two different people this way. If playing speed metal is a good mental exercise, then the only thing you can conclude about Dave Mustaine is that he's smarter now than when he started playing. You can't conclude that he's smarter than anyone else, no matter what activities they participate in. The classical musician very well may have started out at such a high IQ that no amount of mental exercise will allow Dave to catch up.
Ask HN: About all this Lisp fuzz
I know a little of Lisp. Not much, never went much far than 4th, maybe 5th chapter on PG's book. I did some exercises and I understand the power that Lisp brings. Maybe not fully, but I can see the potential. Before you ask, I used Lispbox to set it up, which gave me e-Macs with a Lisp extension, but which implementation I am not sure, although I know it is not any Scheme one.

Now, I am following all those articles posted here today about the Lisp's problems and they look to me quite similar to the Linux distro's problem, in that everyone has one that (s)he likes and disses (if not plainly hates) all others.

This, on the Linux world has prevented it from becoming the mainstream OS it should be, and gave Windows an undeserving and lasting afterlife. It could have died with the Vista fiasco, and it nearly did so, but now it is posing a serious comeback with Seven. Linux failed to seize the moment and Lisp is doing more or less the same.

Now, answer me these, since my knowledge of Lisp is severely lacking to make sense of it. If I am completely wrong about something, be merciful.

As far as I understand, Lisp has some 'low level' functions that are some sort of axioms on whom the implementations are built onto, right?

If this is true and everything on the language are built atop of those, or atop of stuff built atop of those (in n-levels), how can different implementations possible be incompatible?

If everyone is aware of the Lisp's problems, why isn't anyone moving to fix them?

Why, when one tries, the answer must always be another implementation with 'more' features instead of creating the cleanest possible implementation with 'the least' features allowing maximum compatibility?

I have more questions, but I need to understand these first if anyone has the patience to answer.

I am most grateful for your time.
Learn how to haggle for a bargain
It's not a language, but look at the Linux kernel. The jump from 2.4 to 2.6 was significant - programs that took advantage of some of the added support in 2.6 couldn't run on 2.4 kernels. 2.4 was maintained because many people used it, but eventually all new development started occurring in 2.6 Now 2.6 is the default.

I hope Python will go through the same process. It's not that Python 2.x is dead, but that we've scheduled its retirement.
Ease of use is important, we certainly agree on that. But "git clone url" vs "svn co url" and "git commit -a" vs "svn commit" isn't significantly more complex.
I fight for the right evaluation, no matter what. So, for future rounds, you will be benefited by this trait of mine.
And I'm pretty sure eru understood that, which is why he pointed out you can achieve the same functionality by naming them.
Sometimes issues like this are less about the language than the code conventions for a company/project, though. If (for example) prefacing variables with a _ is a short convention for saying, "While the language we're using doesn't enforce private variables, we only expect this to be used internally, and will feel free to make major changes to it. Consider yourself warned.", that's still highly useful.

Of course, if you have such conventions, be consistent.
> programs that took advantage of some of the added support in 2.6 couldn't run on 2.4 kernels.

yeah but programs which ran on 2.4 kernels still run on 2.6 right? So the situation is totally different.
You can also only check out the history to a certain depth, if this is a problem.
Toward a Better Way to Deploy Movable Type Template Sets
French 'pass' piracy legislation
How did you do that? I have zero flash. (I'm on x86_32 though).
The only real issue I have with my Kindle 2
Couldn't the upstream repository just not accept changes to that file? I'm sure this could just be managed by some kind of commit hook.
The argument that Lisp is too complicated for the average programmer is clearly nonsense: Anyone smart enough to use C++ to a professional standard is certainly smart enough to use Lisp. It's just sour grapes.
Well, not being fat doesn't mean you are fit, but being fat is certainly incompatible with being fit. I speak as a fat guy who's probably less unfit than 95% of people at my weight (over 320 lbs): I'm still not "fit".
On the "boast", that probably came off a bit strongly. I'm pretty much a dick online. And in person my friends tell me... :-D

Anyways, yes, OK, nothing new under the sun. I don't doubt better programmers than me did this awhile back. I'm just not aware of another OSS or Commercial O/RM that provides it, and I'd never seen it before.

Also, I can't take credit for actually _implementing_ the Lazy Loading Contexts... that was someone else. Really smart guy, but he dropped out of the project eventually.

DM is just crazy sometimes, but with 0.10 Dan says that's changing. I'd trust it again when someone big deploys and raves about it, I just don't have any motivation to investigate it personally. I think there's better things to spend your time on considering Sequel is around. Why fight it?

I took code from Sharon early on (connection pooling), he took code from me (block query syntax), Sequel is kinda the best of both worlds. I've never thought building an O/RM on top of a Table Data Gateway was a good idea, but that's mostly a performance concern, and Sequel's performance is right up there so does it really matter?

My only concern with Sequel is that last I looked it's not as robust as Hibernate when it comes to aliasing tables. But then what is? It's probably a rare enough issue that you can just get around it with the sproc or ad-hoc query support once or twice in a given large app.
War of Attrition: Interpretations and Applications | The Incidental Economist
What Do You Buy After Your Netbook Dies?
Quite true, buying solar panels is a capital spend rather than an operating cost. But if a trade war broke out, it would take a year or two to build the physical manufacturing facilities here, and we'd be at a competitive disadvanatage until that is done.

If you think of trade economic warfare - and a great many people do, whether we agree or not - then physical goods are the ammunition. We do not fully understand a software-based economy yet, and for the foreseeable future software still has to run on a physical substrate, most of which takes place overseas.

Suppose, just for example, we had a trade war with China and began levying punitive tariffs. China responds by, say, telling the companies that currently manufacture iPhone hardware to stop supplying Apple and start building a 4g version for the Chinese market. The government there has the economic and political heft to do that. It would not be a rational decision, but remember that rationality in war = predictability and thus defeatability. Surprise is a key strategic element.

Well, where would Apple be if their suppliers suddenly cut them off? Sure, they could take their designs to manufacturers in other countries, even in the US. But it would probably take a year to ramp up production with sufficient quality control. What do you think would happen to their stock price?
Profitable vs. unprofitable companies in the IPO market
Thanks for the comments.

We're currently addressing the issue in regards to the lack of a cohesive platform for many of these applications to exist. As we roll out new components of the system, we'll update our marketing accordingly.
When your server's drive crashes, and you lose all of your history... you'll feel some pain. Backups help, but not as good as git does.

See what happened with _why? He nuked everything, but none of it really went away. With CVCS, the community would have lost everything.
What is a monad, why should I use it, and when is it appropriate?
"Totally different," no. Not exactly the same, yes. Similar enough to make a meaningful comparison? I think so.
"How does git make programmer A want to disentangle the fix?"

Wrong question; the correct question is "Why does SVN make the programmer not want to disentangle the fix?" The answer is that SVN makes it a royal pain in the ass. Not impossible. Nothing is impossible. But it's a royal pain in the ass. Git makes it roughly as hard as it should be; there's a certain amount of essential complexity, but it lowers the accidental complexity to something feasible. (I use Fred Brook's "accidental" vs "essential" complexity terminology from the Mythical Man Month; if you don't know what that is, hie thee hence to amazon and acquire the Mythical Man Month.)

The reason I phrase it this way is that it's really a given that the fix should be disentangled; even SVN proponents will tend to agree with this as a matter of principle. So the question is, why have we all just gotten used to not bothering?

"How does git make merging easier?"

Again, correct question is "How does SVN make merging hard?" and the answer is "in numerous ways". However, in git, it actually works the way it always should have worked. SVN brings way too much accidental complexity to the task of merging, which is evidenced by the way people avoid it like the plague, whereas the exact same people have no problem using git for it.

"It sounds like you're handwaving!" - OK, you didn't say this but I see it coming. The answer is either Google to someone treating this subject more fully (it's not that hard to find), or try it yourself; I see no point in repeating such people's work in a limited HN comment. (Many of them have diagrams and such.) It is not comparable. It is a night-and-day difference unless you are the only person using your SVN repository, and even then git is still nicer.
Google already has a great captcha for their signup process. The primary motivation must have been the OCR benefits.
Tagged: rumor, linkbait, misleading.
* interactive commits let you commit only parts of what you're working on. It's really easy just to commit the lines that were involved with the fix, and leave everything else alone.

* Even the best tools can be used wrong.

* It makes merging easier by making it work fast and work well. There's a lot more merging, it's not painful!
Well, if you compare Chrome 3.0 vs Firefox 3.0 (or 3.5), what features does Chrome not have? As far as I can tell it's only missing Firefox's extensions so if you can live without Adblock, Firebug, etc you can trade the extensions for Chrome's outright speed.
Neat, but I wish we were bombarding Mars and/or venus with extremophile bacteria, tardigrades and what'all else to see what sticks.

Of course, there's always the hope that as we ID more earth-like planets one of them might prove to be broadcasting on a wavelength we can receive.
We use git-svn extensively at work. It is pretty good at allowing us to keep our central core dev branch going on SVN with numerous teams not using git-svn, while allowing us to do all our release branching and such in git. I would not be happy to use it in a situation where we had multiple concurrent SVN branches, but then, I wouldn't care to be using SVN there either.

You really do get the bulk of the advantages; it's not perfect, and if you have to coordinate with someone not using git it can be a challenge, but it mostly works. People were briefly annoyed at our "patch bombs" but got over it.
You're still getting free bot-prevention. If you don't like it, use something like Damien Katz's Negative CAPTCHA (hide a field with CSS, call it email, and wait for a bot to fill it out, and check that that field is empty server-side).
Modern editors make mass-renaming easy

I'm in Java-land where we have, bar none, the best refactoring support in the world.

Unless you consider the settings files, documentation, publicly exposed APIs, existing customer installations, projects dependent on the current project, web services, Apache configurations, and XML soup.

But yeah, other than that, renaming something is a simple matter of alt-shift-R and typing the new name.
Java appealed to the industrial users: a controlled language specified down to the instruction level, no complicated features, absolute stability on all levels. The SUN Java courses were just that: the programmer has to learn the language constructs and the library. Then the programmer learns some patterns to use the language effectively

Lisp is the antithesis to this: it is a language laboratory - the programmable programming language. The programmer needs to develop skills to understand when and how to change the language. Changing and extending the language is a core mechanism. This makes the language unstable and puts a lot of linguistic power into the programmer. With Lisp you need to trust the programmer and the programmer has to learn how to justify the trust (by learning to effectively use macros, by learning when and when not to use EVAL, ...).

The Lisp programmer has to learn how to program languages and the concepts he may want to use for that.
He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall sooner or later.

Malthus is still right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
But Lisp was not designed to script applications.

One word: Guile.
Only because every time it gets stuck, it "asks" a human.
thank you. i suppose this makes sense, i guess i don't understand objects / functions as well as I thought. I thought that Math was like a static thing from other languages, where you wouldn't ever create a new Math() and therefore the this operator wouldn't make sense...
When you say you are a "user", are you not a programmer? If so, then you probably won't see much to be excited about.

If you are a programmer and you aren't seeing how source control helps you (and it sounds like you weren't seeing any particular benefit with SVN either), then you either don't have much experience, or are dangerously close to being the type of programmer who repeats the same year ten times, rather than acquiring ten years of experience. You really need to work on internalizing what source control allows you to do, git, svn, or otherwise. Not knowing what source control is good for is like a furniture maker wondering what a lathe is good for, beyond turning a simple cylinder. (Among other things, if there was a Furniture News, that's not the sort of comment that ought to be getting upvotes...)

Edit: Yes, nothing scores downmods like telling people that you need to know things to be a good developer. Guess what? You need to know things to be a good developer. Knowing what source control is and how to use it effectively is one of them. Downmodding me won't make that go away, nor will it magically make people who don't "get" source control better developers.
Or the team.
This might help: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf
While this is nothing more than a dubious rumor at this point, it still adds to my growing sense that acquisitions in the valley are inclining right now.

In recent days we've seen FriendFeed, Mint, Omniture, and reCAPTCHA acquired by large companies. Is this a real trend or does it just feel like one?
Seems to be a lot of speculation. Would have liked to see the actual numbers as well as whether their follower numbers increased at all. Stopped reading when the predictions started.
You should checkout http://www.redmine.org/. Not only does it have real git support, but I much prefer it to Trac.
The site looks really nice on the surface. As I dug deeper though it was really tough to determine exactly what you could provide me. I found one page with a small screenshot but that was as close as I got to seeing what your app even looked like. My suggestion would be to add some more screenshots or a walkthrough video of what you can provide to potential clients. Other than being light on details, the site looks really good.

I'm obviously not in your target market so take my advice with a grain of salt.
Bing Visual Search: A great Innovation
For long ,search engines are displaying users a list of links as the search results.We all know how Images help in explaining a particular topic as compared to text.Images also help consumers in better and faster decision making.
Github under DDoS
30 years experience as teacher/head of a $30K/year private school?

No - you aren't qualified to teach in a state school, and the teacher's union welcomes the decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_Jones-Parry
This is good but the one I'm looking for was more like comic. With examples of how say police monopolize the spectrum for emergencies now,and how they could still get priority in a more dynamic system.