skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interfacing with an another team to solve problems in a framework they didn't like (even if just aesthetically)

I think dislike for aesthetic reasons is one of the best reasons to do your own rewrite. I can imagine that proposing radical changes to e.g. API style of an existing FOSS project would be the most difficult up-hill battle.
It is good, but the OP talks about embedding a graphical web browser not a text-based one.
One thing that's worth talking about, and I'm trying to find a journalist to write about this is that I used a combination of web stuff (my blog, Twitter, Facebook) and pounding on journalists. I kept a really close eye on the rate of change in the signature count and when it started to slow I hammered on old media to get the story out there.

The major inflection points (past the initial push caused by the LGBT press and places like Hacker News) was getting the story on the BBC. Key to that was Richard Dawkins. He simply signed the petition and said so publicly and then went on Channel 4 news. With him on board it was easy to tell a story to the journalists and off it went.
Bash commands - Linux MAN Pages
I actually like this idea quite a bit.

No sarcasm.
A committee of supernerds convened the other day and decided the new standard is...

<sarcasm>

Which means that if you're still using ie, you have to continue using the deprecated standard.

</sarcasm>
He is not being any more negative about the US than the article itself was, and yes as I child I did all those things in the US.
thanks.It gave me a good understanding of what this is capable of. How is it in terms of performance ? Can I process gigabytes of data in minutes ?
My experience was the opposite. I started programming with C and Perl. How are you supposed to do that on Windows?

Setting up the system to be able to run compiler commands from the command line is very hard on Windows.

On Mac/Linux/UNIX you get that all for free, out of the box, and every tutorial on the web makes sense. With MS it's always some crazy proprietary thing that is hard to find good documentation for (at least it was ~10 years ago, when I was starting to program).

I never got serious about programming until I switched to Linux (I use a Mac, now) because it was just too hard to get started on Windows.
Not in emacs as such, though very similar as far as interface, keybindings, etc. is Conkeror (http://conkeror.org/). Still missing some needed features, notably screen-splitting, but overall quite usable.
That's one of the most adorable Internet photos by far.

EDIT: http://i.thefairest.info/cutest_thumbs/sP3GqA.jpeg
Wow,

This is the first time I've heard anyone else describe the happy-path phenomena, yet I previously talked about it any time anyone ever asked about the goodness of MS software.

I'd also mention that the Happy Path is also a verbose path. I recently looked at a C# application and a C++ application that each did about the same thing. I was amazed to find the C# app had least ten times the source code. Moreover, the C# app seemed to be coded in the proper C# way and worked generally well. The main thing is that the problems that it did have (memory leaks) were utterly, irrevocably, totally, completely unsolvable...

So there are trade-offs in all these things that are very "unobvious"...
Heh. This is the exact inverse of something I have been thinking about - an elisp bytecode interpreter in javascript. IE, run emacs in your browser; although it would take a lot more than the bytecode interpreter to get that far - one would have to reimplement enough of the C portion of emacs in javascript to get it working.
The general point of the article rings true with me. An early prototype helps pinpoint the hotspots of complexity, which were probably not at all obvious in the design stage. I have run into this with my programming. I tend to start out with an overly-complicated model, and whittle away extraneous junk which do not improve flexibility or expressive power.

Now about chairs. I find the general idea fascinating --- the Holy Grail of chair design conforms to the user with no adjustments and stays there with no special use of the user's muscles (for example, there should be no need to fiddle with a tilt limiter or tilt tension; I should be able to just sit back at precisely the angle I want right now, and the chair should stay there; if I change my sitting angle, the chair should follow and stay in the new position). If this Setu chair does this, fantastic. It certainly pushes the envelope of task chair design by providing bases different from the usual 5-tentacle rolling octopus, a strong point in its favor.

The article says that this group produced the Mirra. I hope it learned from its mistakes with the Mirra, which has an uncomfortably hard and inflexible back. Strangely, Herman-Miller's web site lists the Setu chair in its "multipurpose" category, not its "work" category. I'll reserve judgement until I find a place to try it out, but it's hard to do worse than the uncomfortable Celle, or the Embody (ugly, heavy, outrageously expensive, and not even comfortable). The Aeron remains the gold standard, but it is starting to look a little dated (in a nice way, I suppose), and it does require a decent amount of fiddling.
Seriously? We're discussing this on HN?

No; you cannot, generally, hear electricity, though you can hear the effects of electricity. Transformers hum, CRTs whine and sizzle, speakers buzz and hiss, and sometimes electricity arcs causing a popping sound as it interacts with the air (very rapidly consuming oxygen and producing light and heat and sound).

Weird superstitions about electricity are not interesting.
Actually, the SuperMemo site covers just this topic: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/programming.htm

tl;dr: if you will spend more than 5 minutes looking it up or trying to remember it over the next 10/20 years, then it's a net gain to memorize it in a SRS.

I find this plausible, but I'm not sure 5 minutes is right - I understand from Anki users (Anki's statistics include 'how much total time ever have I spent looking at/on this particular card') that a card will cost you more than 5 minutes, and more like 10 minutes.
The Catch-22 for Freelance Workers Trying to Buy Homes
There are a number of SRS clones already produced for the iPhone in the store (Mnemosyne, I understand, works fine on OS X); there's also a Mnemosyne clone in early development for the iPhone.
My suggestion is addressed to the mature HN members that are both able and willing to engage in a civilized discussion.

Hopefully you and other ethusiasts of flinging the metaphorical poo will not be able to disrupt the conversation.
A wink works pretty good, and often relieves potential tension, i.e. ;-)

And for the people who can get off a high horse about online slang and talk with a bit of inflection, gratuitous emotional additions like Whoahohoho and Ohhhh work pretty good too. A lot of people are really too into formal communication though, as evidenced by those commenting here who don't appreciate the value of well placed sarcasm.
I'm not sure whose site is funnier, his or Eric Litman's:

http://ericlitman.com/
I've done lots of windows command line programming, mostly in Ruby but some Perl . That was in the last 2-4 years, so it has gotten better but I also did Python programming seven years ago and it wasn't hard at all. Scite is free and more or less the same on all platforms.

Windows C++ command line programming is a bit of a pain but it's just the same setting-your-configuration-pain-in-the-neck that everyone is complaining about Linux having. I can navigate files with vi but has always been the least intuitive system I could imagine, like brainfuck but not a joke.
Then we can have a sarcasm search engine!
There's an alternate explanation I'd like to add: there simply haven't been many good games in 2009.

Avid gamers, think back to 2008 and 2007... I spent way too much time in front of my TV back then, because there were quality titles coming out.

In 2009 I did not buy a single game until Batman: Arkham Asylum this month. This is the first time in ever that I can remember not buying any games for the first 8 months of the year.

And the worst part is, this will get worse. Many of the most anticipated games of the holiday season have gotten pushed into Q1 2010. Q4 2009 is going to go down in history as a very, very painful quarter for game publishers.
We need a ".ego" TLD.
Agreed. Greenfield projects are far more enjoyable, and you tend to learn more. Obviously we can't always do that and succeed, but they did well enough in this case. Preferably they'd go easier on the remarks about existing open source frameworks though.
The yahoo finance docs are non-existant, but poking around the source for http://www.goldb.org/ystockquote.html should give you an idea of how to use it. delay is 20 minutes.
Do we all get the day off?
"Transformers hum, CRTs whine and sizzle, speakers buzz and hiss, and sometimes electricity arcs causing a popping sound as it interacts with the air"

That is what is interesting, and what I am interested in. What causes those sounds? They obviously aren't weird superstitions, so what is the rational explanation?
Less Wrong : The New Nostradamus
All good points, thanks. I guess I don't have a good handle on how much it's kidnappers vs cars in a typical parent's mind. I have some intuitions, and they seem to differ from yours, but I can't back that up with anything. And I probably did underestimate cars as a factor, being used to living in a large city with orderly traffic lights all the way.
I considered linking to the first article linked in the Less Wrong post, http://www.good.is/post/the-new-nostradamus/ , but it's a couple of years old, and there are several interesting links from the comments of the LW post.
That's not a problem, you just bundle it together. Java applications and PC games have done that for years.

The only tricky part is that developers constantly complain about downloading some new programming language just to run a program. Guys...it's the year 2009. You can buy a terabyte hard-drive for a few hundred bucks and your 'net connection isn't that slow anymore.
Every application attempts to expand until it can browse web pages. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

— http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
Medvedev has been witnessed using macbooks and is internet savvy guy.
I assume you're talking about noncommercial free/open source software.

I imagine it's very easy to deal with Red Hat, the PostgreSQL company, SUN/Oracle (who the hell owns MySQL??), etc. They all have sales teams and purchasing departments and all that jazz.
You might be missing the point. Had FriendFeed worked on improving Twisted and it's documentation to make it easier to use, they would have achieved what they needed in less time and would have avoided fragmenting the resources of the open source community among two projects.
NETI - Eesti Interneti Kataloog ja Otsingusüsteem
Web service to make your twitter feed shiny
Bach canon played forwards and backwards as a moebius strip
Imagining lots of tedious steps? Or one fun step?
edit: poorly worded "doesn't belong here" comment removed.
I guess banks are doing all they can to try to ensure that people won't end up defaulting on their home mortgages. If only they had been strict from the start with their requirements rather than giving loans out so readily five years ago. That could have stopped a lot of the foreclosure problems we are having now in the US.

Now the banks finally choose to crack down, but at the expense of legitimate people who would like to get a home.
ShinyCocos : A Ruby wrapper for Cocos2D-IPhone
Open source != noncommercial. Proprietary != commercial.

Stop abusing those words and twisting their meanings please.
yes, it's btilly.
I am not sure what is your point. The fact that tedious work is left around is in fact due to the lack of incentives for open source developers, not any instristic structure of open source itself.

Lot of them are non-profit, so of course they don't even try that hard. What do you expect, hard core ass kicking software?

Sometime, you will find hard core ass kicking software.

I still remember fanastic open source games like battle for wesnoth that are easy to install on window, and even more so on linux with pacman or apt-get. It look like it can compete with any reasonable indie game.
"I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com."

I assume that your 80k line app must have been written very poorly. Like any other good language PHP can be misused to create horrifying spaghetti code. That doesn't mean the language is no good.
Redundant pigeons would reduce the data loss, although maintenance costs would rise.
While my experience might not be typical, 25+ years of chasing work (strongly) suggests that purchasing a house is NOT a good thing to do if you cannot change jobs without changing locations. Otherwise, getting laid off mean selling your house at short notice, often in a declining market, ...

So, if you are highly sought after in the valley, or Austin or some other secure technical area, go for it. Otherwise, keep the strengths and weaknesses in mind as tenants.
This type of comment seems to me more of a problem than this type of article. The article may or may not be interesting to the intellectually curious, but yet another comment about something not being hacker news definitely isn't.

Though the article is a bit superficial, the question it explores is an interesting one. Kids' lives have become dramatically more circumscribed in just one generation. I've spent a good deal of time wondering about that: why it happened, and what the consequences will be.
The TC “Bump”, What It Really Means & How To Navigate It.
You don't need someone to tell you what to do -- he/she already gave you the general idea.

Why can't you be similarly creative with your class and run with it?
This guy has a huge ego (check out his blog).

But taking a 30K risk when you're 16 is pretty impressive, especially considering how poor his family was.

EDIT: Not his blog, his site.
> I am not sure what is your point. The fact that tedious work is left around is in fact due to the lack of incentives for open source developers, not any instristic structure of open source itself.

Agreed, and this is "Why Users Dumped Your Open Source App for Proprietary Software".
The summary page, http://www.evolution-is-degeneration.com/index.asp?PaginaID=... , says explicitly that this is an argument for Intelligent Design. On the summary page alone I saw at least 5 obvious errors of theory or fact. In other words, don't waste your time.
What is a "self-teacher"?

The advantage of holding "fancy degrees" is usually that you have been exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints and insignt that self-taught people might have. People tend to study what they are interested in. Unfortunately, this can produce self-taught academics with horse blinders on.

Imaging you only got your news from Reddit & Huffington Post, saying you were becoming a self-taught news commentator. You'd probably end up incredibly informed... about liberal viewpoints, perhaps not realizing that a large portion of the country doesn't share them. Getting taught in a formal education system (providing the system works) would expose you to a wider variety of views.
I've anecdotally heard of F# kicking C#s butt when it comes to throughput, but you'll have to poke around on the web to find out more. Sorry I can't provide more details.
Out of curiosity, are Y-Combinator folks (start-up founders, etc.) programming for .NET to begin with? It seems the focus here is usually on web apps and the iPhone.
"The number 256 is chosen because it is the number of integers that can be expressed using a single eight-byte"

is the translation off or is this really what they said?
It's actually got some good ideas but I think you'll find it less of the guiding light that you might expect. It was written in the world of the waterfall method, batch processing computers, and systems development. It has some really interesting stories about OS/360, but I think you'll find more guidance in a modern book on Agile methods.
> How is it in terms of performance ?

Same as C#, according to the author, but that probably presupposes that you'd be doing the same thing in both (equally imperative code).
If the title included the words "MOST AWESOME VIDEO EVAR!!! MUST WATCH!", it would not be an exaggeration.
Harvard, Yale Are Big Losers in 'The Game' of Investing
Lotus Symphony is even slower than Lotus Notes on my machine (Lenovo T61) and neither of them startup in less than 10 seconds. That's a deal breaker right there. But at least it LOOKS (superficially) better than Lotus Word Pro which they preinstalled on my machine. I still use that though because Lotus Word Pro takes about 2 seconds to start up. Way better.
The translation is a bit off - the original text is correct. But these are not Medvedev's actual words anyway.
FWIW, I haven't seen any security cameras near schools (in the US), let alone inside. I've also become pretty adept at spotting them in places like stores. Also, its unlikely that the school district will do anything like that in the near future since they're basically broke.

People will always make mistakes. Two years ago a single school computer had it's configuration messed up so that it mounted the school office's storage for everyone. That meant anyone who entered the school could potentially download a database containing the home address, phone number, full name, and other information on every single student there (over 1500). After thinking long and hard I decided not to report it. The reason? I'd most likely be expelled for stumbling across it since they could term it attempted hacking. I only share this here because this alias has rock-solid anonymity (or is that just hubris?).
Seems like I remember reading a blog where there were some gamer-programmers who had these huge log files to process. Using C# it was just too much -- it took too long. But by using F# (and block operations I think?) they reduced it to some crazy time like 5 minutes or something.

Theoretically they should be the same; they all run on the CLR. But I think F# lends itself to stuff like tail-recursion and data operations such that the code has a tendency to self-optimize as you write it, which is kinda neat.
That sure does look like a link though...
Perhaps this explains the hate for PHP by "real" developers:

"It tends to be that code wins. If two groups are arguing, but one group has an implementation and the other doesn't, well, the implementation wins. It almost doesn't matter how braindead it is; if we should have the feature, but we can't agree on the implementation, we'll go with whoever builds it."
The guy is pretty impressive for a lot of reasons. It's better read in his book/autobiography: http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Learned-Rewards-Entrepreneurship...

It's a great insight in his building a business against his parent's wishes (while still a minor), how he managed things, partnerships and legal stuff that went sour, what he did between his first exit and his second company (built a restaurant, invested in stocks and quit, etc.) and more. It's a good read.
Be your own Wizard
Silly question: the GFS referred to here is Global File System (http://www.redhat.com/gfs/) not Google File System, right?
Awesome, thanks; I really want to find that Journal of Portfolio Management paper.
A Status Report on the P versus NP Question [pdf]
Well, that's the goal of mod_wsgi, isn't it? To make it easier to deploy Python web applications, especially in shared hosting environments?

mod_wsgi should allow you to just drop in a .wsgi anywhere and run it, provided your host allows for that. Do you think there's anything preventing it from catching on?
Still, there's the potential for terraforming Mars or some of the rocky moons in our own solar system.
That'll be great...and hopefully address one of concerns about having our private repos sitting on ATAoE storage.
Would have been nice to see a joint statement (or at least concurrent statements) out of EY and Github. This way it looks like EY is just trying to beat them to the punch...either out of bad blood or to get in front of any potential bad PR.
Original says "eight-bit byte".
I am so not impressed when politicians and government start doing something meaninglessly nice to any of the industries, because this is so full of shit. Like who cares about programmer's day? Do you? A best any programmer can do to please himself professionally is to write a great piece of code.

Unfortunately, these sort of things are used by politicians all over the world to make an illusion that they care and are doing something when in reality they do not. And unfortunately some smart people also buy it.
I apologise. It's rather hard to get the exact terminology correct, let alone on an ad-hoc basis while trying to remain somewhat readable. As I was writing, my focus was on trying to avoid the loaded term "free".

I'm also not exactly sure what the correct term is to refer to the common situation of having free-to-download open-source software, because "open-source freeware" looks utterly ridiculous.

That said, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even my misuse of wording is accurate.
And do you think that _just_ knowing every function that already exists and how to use it would you make an expert ???

A little more productive maybe, but this is indeed neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to be called an expert.

Higher levels considerations are far more important.
I am the black wizards.
The link you yourself cite shows a fourfold speed advantage for procedural PHP over ROR. Not mentioned is the large memory footprint of a Rails process compared to a procedural PHP page.

Apples and oranges. Why not compare plain PHP to plain Ruby to be fair?

and likes to publish its documentation in video format.

Hardly a negative point. The screencasts are one of the reasons Rails became so popular in the first place.
My comment came from a place of arrogance, something that is wholly inappropriate when I'm talking with someone like you.

Now, clearly, your opinion of what hacker news ought to be counts a lot more than mine, but I will explain my opinion anyhow. I am here because this site attracts a reasonable proportion of people who are better than I am (or, at least measurably better than I am at something.)

My problem with the article was that it's a subject that anyone can talk about, with no real 'right' or 'wrong' answer. there's no provability. When speaking of politics or religion everyone has equal authority.

Articles like this attract the sort of people who make slashdot mediocre, which is to say, everyone. I could write a few pages on childhood independence, and how that shaped me. But I don't know any more about it than the next guy over, so unless you have some personal interest in me, I don't think what I'd have to say would be interesting.

The thing is, articles like this, where anyone can comment are inherently more popular, and will take over any site on which they are tolerated, because people like being the authority. I do it too. Hell, I'm doing it right now. The thing is, it's not very much fun reading someone write about something they know little about.
Ehh - having to watch a Vimeo video to understand how this works and how to do things on Daytum is extremely annoying. More work should be done on the ease of use end.

I get the idea that it's cool to present minimalist designs, but they should seriously considering adding some clear on screen instructions for new users.