skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm hoping a more normal person would simply not be interested in most of the topics that appear here. Another term for normal is that mythical average person, who by definition of average does not share your well beyond average and deep interest in subject X.

Having taken a brief look at your submission, I find them great, and hope no outsiders are voting them down because they are too technical.
MIT Students Explain How to Photograph Space for $150
Computer programming is young enough as a field that the mainstream hasn't realized it isn't possible to fit everything into one unified taxonomy. (Biologists and librarians have both spent over a century trying, and they have a lot of insight on the matter.) Putting types into a hierarchy is a useful abstraction sometimes, but there's not some Grand Truth in it -- often, attempts at cramming disparate elements into a hierarchy just create extra complexity. Most systems will keep trying to turn back into graphs unless you anchor the hierarchy in a specific context (what does 'a IS-A b' mean, really?), and the context tends to shift with the problem definition.

Worse still, it's the sort of complexity that looks like work, even though it's usually more like flailing in quicksand.

I think not having to deal with class hierarchies is a big reason why some people find dynamically-typed languages so freeing. I'm still kind of new to Erlang, but I think its push towards modeling things via a graph of communicating processes, with a relatively flat type structure, is worth considering as an alternative. It explicitly focuses on the message protocol between actors, rather than a tree of subtypes. Granted, I haven't worked a large enough project to see it break down and get ugly yet. (C++ style OO sounds good on paper, too.)

Regardless, it isn't classes per se that lead to OO's problems, but the tendency to overuse inheritance. Among statically-typed languages, Haskell's typeclasses seem like another good solution - they break the hierarchy of inheritance up into composition of properties.

Also, the late-binding in OOP means that any class can potentially be responsible for maintaining its invariants even after any of its methods has been overridden by any possible future subclasses. That's not necessarily true even with dynamically-typed languages.
Young right-wingers I've met (and I understand this sample to be anecdotal) are mainly concerned with keeping the size of government small and taxes low. I've not met a single person under 35 who thinks that cannabis prohibition is a good idea. Granted, most of these people have a college degree, but I'd say that's also a good indicator of whether they vote and participate in the democratic process.

I think that, unfortunately for Colombia, cocaine will be illegal in the United States indefinitely. I actually think that what's happening in South America is the best argument against drug prohibition, but you don't get to Congress or the White House arguing for policies that are good for South America.
It is all flat files. Read the arc code, it is very interesting.
One of the most interesting points he makes in this talk is about separating out what Eric Evans might refer to as supporting generics (AFAIK) from the applications to write into separate libraries and open-sourcing them.

To me that's almost certainly the way for truth and good but fails to acknowledge that good libraries take a _really_ long time to write; ages. And then you have all this issue over being unable to change published interfaces because people rely on them now and dependency management etc. We need better programming languages before I'd be comfortable advocating that advice.
The first I am more than willing to pay

I'm more than willing to buy a small country on your credit -- when it's not yours to offer it means nothing to say you are willing to pay it.

privileged knowledge of the "greater good"

You don't know the greater good, you define a greater good.
I understand the author is trying to show pitfalls of OO design. But the square/rectangle example doesn't do it for me.

1 - "There are actually several problems here. Thread safety is one, but let’s assume the class doesn’t need to be thread-safe."

The Rectangle implementation has a thread issue without regard to the Square subclass:

public double getPerimeter() {
return 2*width + 2*height;
}

2 - "In object oriented programming, it is necessary that a subclass be able to fulfill the contract of its superclass. In this case, that means the square has to respond to setHeight() and setWidth() calls. However doing so enables the square to violate the nature of a square. A square cannot stand in for a rectangle.

You can try to work around this by overriding the setHeight() and setWidth() methods. For example, one might call the other:...

However this is fundamentally unsatisfying because there is no reasonable expectation that calling one of setHeight() on a Rectangle object will also invoke the setWidth() method or vice versa."

This is where things unwind. It is perfectly expected that calling setHeight() on a Square will also change its width.

3 - "We could instead just forbid setHeight() and setWidth() completely by throwing UnsupportedOperationException"

Yep, you could do that and it does show you are doing more work in working around using Square as a subclass of Rectangle. So either don't subclass it or accept the fact that its perfectly normal that if you have a Square, changing either its width or height will effect the other.

The author is trying too hard here. Its decent writing and a good attempt to show how subclassing can lead to unintended consequences. But this is not a great example.
IPot: Finding Medical Marijuana with iPhone
Universities need to change. Education needs to change for that matter. It's an open-book world now. The emphasis has to move to skills development over personal knowledge accumulation.
The whole point of Windows is that it's an operating system. Depending on your market/skills you either develop for it or not. I prefer to develop for it because when it comes to C++ programming, it's the best out there.

This story made porting look easy, but rest assured it is hard, and he won't be so thrilled when the problems start cropping up.
Sending Email via IPv6: A Survey
But we don't know that Yodlee isn't doing 170M revenues a year either. Getting aquired and making money don't necessarily equate to each other in the most obvious ways.

Youtube was a huge money sink, and got a huge acquisition. Mint is, I believe at least, somewhat profitable, and only got $170M. The timing had a lot more to do with it than anything, but as a consumer, I'm a LOT more likely to give money to Mint than Youtube, and the YouTube founders are arguably a lot richer than the Mint founders.
What's up with Textmate? Have you moved on?
Techcrunch50 Team Liveblog - SiliconANGLE
Note too that this thread: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/830094523... discusses potential replacements for it.
I like it!

The first time I tried a PHP snippet I didn't copy the <?php ?> tags and it didn't highlight anything. However, I quickly figured it out.

You might want to add a message or notice about the <?php ?> requirement.
Note that more of them have been merged to recent Pythons than just the top: the `dict` constructor can now take kwargs (and a first dict argument, which means you can create an extended copy of dict d with `dict(d, foo='bar', baz='buzz')`), there's a `collections.defaultdict` in 2.5, `namedtuple` in 2.6 is pretty similar to his Struct (though not exactly, `namedtuple` is a type builder, Norvig's `struct` is basically a dict with args instead of items).

`every` and `some` can be emulated by composing `map` (or a listcomp) with the builtin `any` and `all` (which, for some reason, don't take an optional predicate)
What happened to: first check your code, then your compiler and as a last resort your OS? The problem was most likely in his hand-crafted threading code.
Studying functional programming can really illumniate certain concepts in object oriented programming. The solution is a sum type which you can simulate in OOP using an abstract base class (in C# parlance) and a set of sibling classes that derive from it. So, as other have mentioned, you could have an abstract Polygon (or quadralateral) base class
Birds on the Wires (set to music)
He could have, but he couldn't get it to compile. Either way, he should have just used QtConcurrent (since he's using Qt).

The performance issue looks like more of an excuse to me; I can think of at least five things to try before changing the OS would even enter my mind.
I have a MacBook 3,1 (Santa Rosa), and have no issues with sound, graphics, or anything else. The only things that took some configuration were copying the iSight firmware from OS X, and using ndiswrapper for wireless.

I'm running opensuse factory right now, but 11.1 works too.

I also run opensuse factory on my old powerbook and nvidia doesn't have binary linux drivers for ppc, so I'm SOL there, but I don't do any 3d stuff on it anyways. Everything else just works.
The best way to improve your creativity? Read books by Edward De Bono. He's the daddy of this area. He invented the term lateral thinking.
Saving science from "Unscientific America"
I don't write checks either. I've written 2 checks in the last 12 months. One for a used car and one for a bike. Both from private sellers so they didn't take debit cards.

I use my debit and credit cards all day. I never even use cash, primarily so that it all gets categorized automatically by Mint and I'm too lazy to do it for cash by hand.

But in my mind a debit card is the same as checks.

Of course I pay my bills online and have bank access online (you must to use Mint).

The difference I guess is that I'm using multiple companies. Why load up Bank of America, Vanguard, WSFS, Wachovia, Capitol One and Fidelity's websites and use 6 different interfaces on 6 different websites when I can use one unified one?

You seem to have an anti-US bias that you think we are stupid or something. It is a question of how you treat your money, not the tools available.

And you are horribly mistaken on the "burden of filing your own taxes", which again, has nothing to do with Mint. 99% of the work for taxes is done by the HR department at your office and by a tax accountant. I just hand the appropriate papers to the right people, and sign it at the end. Total timer per year: an hour at most. Maybe you shouldn't comment on things you obviously have no knowledge of.
Awesome New Cucumber Feature: Step Argument Transforms
If you're looking for power users, it's public who the 100 users with the most karma are: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Aka: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle-ellipse_problem
For Mac, Slife seems like an alternative.

http://www.slifelabs.com/
Sadly, the company I work for is full of weak, ordinary people :).

Now you see, what I said above could only be understood by people who are fundamentally different.

Should everybody be like that? No way!
Are people like that suitable for any job? No way! But there are jobs that they CAN and DO better than other people.

The whole weak/strong argument does not mean that people like us kick old ladies. But it's pretty likely that we are willing to go against the odds to prove a point or make a difference.

I'm sad that you don't understand the underlying meaning, but I will not shed a tear.
The X11 protocol was standardized in 1987. Any X application which worked then would work now. There are extensions and new capabilities being added, but every one is backwards-compatible.

Ditto with audio APIs -- the last major change was the changeover from OSS to ALSA, in 2002, and to this day there's an OSS compatibility layer.

I've used Linux since early 2001, and in all that time I've never encountered an incompatibility with libc.

The filesystem semantics issue is due to idiot application developers trying to squeeze out a few msec of performance, at the risk of their user's data. The issue exists on every modern filesystem, no matter which OS is used. Anybody who relies on POSIX -- ie, uses fsync() -- doesn't have to worry about that problem.
Why?

Also, he's not a VC.
Novell brings .NET development to the iPhone
a square is indeed not a rectangle therefore i see this as the only flaw that needs to be pointed out:

public class Square extends Rectangle

inheritance for the sake of implementation is bad OO design.
Well, when I wrote my comment I was not thinking of college as something you do to get a job or to get grades even if this is what many people are in it for.

If all someone is looking for is a paper, grades and a job. Then what it article offers seems inevitable. Teh we'll need something else to replace college
In retrospect I made some poor decisions as a result of my inexperience but I agree with you. I have found that if you are more productive you are just given more to do. The X-hour work day is a horrible system for programmers that tends to lead to mediocrity over time. Unfortunately I don't have a better solution outside of starting one's own business.
It's easy to make that pronouncement from a nice white-bread neighborhood in the suburbs. But try living among the underclass for a little while. They need a hell of a lot more authority in their lives than you do.

Right now, Britain is managing to fall apart due to mismanagement of alcohol: http://whiskeys-place.blogspot.com/2009/09/uks-cultural-coll...

I don't have the answers. But we've been spending and spending and spending social capital for decades. The cultural rug has been pulled out from everyone's feet. People interested in having a normal family have a harder time of it than they used to. Drug legalization will make those problems worse, not better.
I believe old educated libertarians don't believe in the drug wars, or any wars for that matter.
That's kind of how I think of the goal of finding a grand unified theory in physics. It seems to me that if such a thing is ever found, it means there is some unifying and "correct" organization to the universe and that'd revolutionize a lot of stuff when the same ideas and structures are applied to all other fields. It'd be a huge win if this worked out - and not just for physics. In my warped and uninformed mind, the grand unified theory, the perfect programming model, P=NP, and countless other such edges of theory are all different facets of the same entity that we have yet to identify - assuming it even exists in an identifiable way in our reality.
Great point about pair programming: The pair become synchronised missing things that an outside perspective would catch. The suggested response is to pair programmer and code review.

It also suggests framing any criticisms you have as questions. I'm going to try and make that a habit.
Why Mint.com + Intuit is a Big Idea
There is not a relationship, just because people do or don't believe in a god, many gods or what have you has little to do with their creativity. If there is a relationship it might be that some religions have an emphasis on reading and books. Some people also confuse the want for secularism with the absence of belief in something. Religious belief is culture as much as anything, often parents bring children up to believe or not.
Problem is from historical conventions of what a square and rectangle are.

A square is not really a thing, its a description of a thing. In this case, proportions of the sides of a shape.

So when you translate this into object oriented language, you are subclassing a concept with one of its potential variations. It would be like making a class called MusicalNote and then a subclass named MusicalNoteC, even though MusicalNote already has it covered.

So "square" shouldn't be a subclass because its just a proportion of the data within "rectangle", so more appriopriately, 'square' would be a method of Rectangle since it deals with internal data.
I think there's a huge start up opportunity here, to found a science-based country.

One nation, under Evidence...
The Web At A New Crossroads
Tiger Woods: Hope is Not a Plan
You got me thinking, maybe I could sum it up better this way:
I don't think it is about getting trivia knowledge or a community, or meeting people, it is about getting a change of mind. I always saw the goal as to change the way you see the world. I am not a reference but is I think why all the articles of that style don't resonate well with me.
What problem does this solve on a wide-scale enough matter for it to be a business?

The concept is valuable, but the implementation seems all wrong. You can only access the files that you pre-shared? That's basically Dropbox, without having hardware to lose or remember.

It seems like this would be better served as a two-piece way to implement an easy version of "GoToMyPC".
Looks good! I would suggest to auto-highlight everything in the HTML box when you click inside it. That would save the user an extra click.
`every` and `some` can be emulated by composing `map` (or a listcomp) with the builtin `any` and `all` (which, for some reason, don't take an optional predicate)

No they can't - this version wouldn't short circuit evaluation, which is completely the wrong behavior. Map would have to apply the predicate to every element of the list before any/all kicked in.

As a trivial example, consider I had a million item list and want to find out if every element is prime. If 8 is the first element, 'every' would return false after looking at the first item - while your composition would apply the prime predicate to all million elements (which would be ridiculously slow ...) before even starting to apply 'all' (which would short circuit, after seeing the first false).
Yes, you do have the answers, although you can't assume they're correct: the article cites studies.

This is exactly the point of doing Science (or at least sociological pseudo-science):

Opinions Are Worthless.
lupin, I think you are taking a really cheap shot at me. I am not arguing that we are about to run out of oil in the near future. I dont think oil will "run dry" in my lifetime, and quite possible not in my kids lifetime as well. So, let me restate my point.

Rebuild an artificial oil reserve of the size of our original natural oil reserve (at the late 19th century levels... regardless of the reserve was known or not), is not an achievable goal for the 21st century. We dont have the time to do the R&D and we dont have the resources to implement the project in the scale needed. Can we do the stuff, I think yes; but un a much lower scale and only for strategic applications that cannot use any other form of less concentrated energy. The rest of society will have to due without or find an alternative solution.

Now...
>Hardly. Prices rise and fall in minutes when there's new information.

That is precisely the problem! Variation within minutes does not produce a consistent strategy, it produces noise. We are guiding the future of ourselves and our children on sheer noise. Not an improvement over the shaman who reads the burned scraps of the dinner.

In peak oil circles, it is a widely held belief that 2005 is the year of Peak Oil (since global oil production has plateaued over the last 5 years or so). I do not believe it is the Peak Oil. I believe we are observing a peak oil, resulting from underinvestment from the Big Oil industry in the 90's, when it was so cheap to bother and they decided to "focus on developing existing reserves". Fortunately, you cannot just declare that you are now exploiting new reserves. It takes both material and human infrastructure that takes time to implement. Thus, demand exceeds supply and you see a barrel rise up to almost $150 USD. This triggers a catalyst to structural problems in finance sector and you end up in recession... unable to command the resources needed to upgrade your infrastructure.
"It is perfectly expected that calling setHeight() on a Square will also change its width."

If you're writing code that operates on Rectangles you wouldn't expect setHeight to have the side-effect of changing the width too.

It's only "perfectly expected" if you know about the implementation details of Square, which may not even have existed until after a lot of Rectangle code was already in place.
I am interested in the Parato-ization of up/downvotes. If one recorded all users who visited each news item and whether or not that user voted at least once, what would the distribution of voting percentages look like?

In the US, old people are a powerful voting block because they vote a lot. Do a small fraction of HN readers have a highly disproportionate effect on karma?
Here's my ratings for the morning session (Product / Presentation) out of 10:

1. Penn & Teller - Product: 3 Presentation: 2

2. Story Something - Product: 7 Presentation: 7

3. Clasemovil - Product: 6 Presentation: 5

4. ToonsTunes.com - Product: 5 Presentation: 5

5. Sealtale - Product: 2 Presentation: 2

6. iTwin - Product: 3 Presentation: 5

7. iMo - rescheduled for evening, their first attempt was painful

8. FluidHTML - Produuct: 5 Presentation: 6

9. Toybots Woozees - Product: 7 Presentation: 7

10. Spawn Labs - Product: 7 Presentation: 8

11. Clicker - Product: 8 Presentation: 7
This smells like a job for Type Classes.
Funny I remember seeing a library (used somewhere internally) where the Rectangle inherited from square. It was a surprising discovery when reading the codebase but the implementation as odd tough.
sounds like they might have used java on the backend :)
Goodbye PAIR, Hello COMIK
Also alluding to survivor bias, which is the bias that invalidates the vast majority of business literature and coverage.
The scientific management of society has a checkered history.
Semantic web apps: for linking people or data?
Is a semantic web app better for linking data or people, or both across the web?

http://www.webepags.com
The BBC has had excellent policies on web development for a long time, it's only recently they started following them.
The 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century
Ask HN: Feeds for white papers?
Anyone know of some good RSS feeds for research publications? Preferably non-closed or pay-wall sites. Also, is there value in doing independent (outside of university or corporate) research and trying to have it published?
>> "Maybe you shouldn't comment on things you obviously have no knowledge of."

Then I wouldn't be able to comment on anything at all! :/

Point taken, maybe things have changed in the US since I was there. My understanding of things was that people still got paid by check, paid bills by check etc, did not get free banking, and paid 'convenience fees' to pay things online etc.
"But try living among the underclass for a little while. They need a hell of a lot more authority in their lives than you do."

That is unbelievably condescending. Sure, there are plenty of people who repeatedly make bad decisions. How on earth is the solution to force them to do the right thing by threatening imprisonment? When that fails, how is imprisonment better than the harm they were causing themselves? What happens when you're wrong about what is right for those poor, incompetent people?

Advise people all you want, but if you want to force people to do things because you think it's better for them, that makes you a Bad Person. Governments are supposed to protect freedom, so if you find yourself suggesting restricting the freedom of people in order to protect them from themselves, you've probably made a logical error somewhere.
A/B testing shows that the market prefers demagoguery and melodrama over evidence.
That's an easy pitch.
Wish for browsers : Adopt MHTML format
Religious conservatives are plentiful, and I doubt their concerns are limited to those you have mentioned, whether they are young or old.
This website is about assisting your creativity. It's throwing up randomness, strange names of any kind. It's fun to watch because it opens your mind to new possibilities when trying to name your service, or even have new ideas.
See also: Emacs' htmlize.

http://dedasys.com/Interp.java.html

the results of running htmlize-buffer on Hecl's Interp.java.