skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How can you not be aware of pain?

Anecdotally, this is fairly common. I have known people that did not realize they had fairly bad back pain until they went to the doctor for something else and had it treated.

Sometimes, it is only in absence of something that we really notice it, especially if it is truly chronic. I suspect most people have gone somewhere with a fairly loud background noise. At first they may notice it, but after being there for a while they may forget about it and may even forget it was ever there. But they will notice and realize how annoying it was if that noise ever stops.
I'm using Clojure to solve real problems.
The lady doth protest too much.

Can't really blame, them, though. They're aiming for the corporate market, and there, the people deciding between Chrome 2.0 and IE 8.0 really don't care for the difference between Java and JavaScript. Well, maybe not the people deciding, but certainly the people they have to explain those decisions to.
To try it: http://www.bunny1.org/
A friend of mine from grad school had a similar experience.

Her daughter's school was short a math teacher and couldn't offer AP calc (which the daughter wanted to take). She offered to teach a class below calculus to free up a teacher for calc. For free, if necessary.

She was told she wasn't qualified. Her degrees: Ph.D. in Math, USA College. B.S. Math, Not USA college. No masters.

Her undergrad degree was apparently not sufficient.

(I'm obscuring some details to protect the guilty.)
The Most Expensive Place To Put A Computer
I don't find the IQ correlation that important, to be honest. What makes a good educator? Is it the ability to process IQ-type problems? Or is it more tied to some other attribute not measured by IQ, say, emphasizing with students? (I have no clue, just saying that IQ may or may not be the end all be all for educators).
> OK for experienced admins, bad for newcomers.

How difficult is to create Solaris packages from source? I must admit I never had the problem.

> I'd also add Zones

Well, Linux has VServer.

> as well as ZFS

I agree zfs is nice. Particularly, given L2ARC and ZIL on SSDs, with large SATA raidz2 or raidz3 behind them.

However, btrfs is making the right noises. Whether they deliver on them or not is not yet known, but if they do Solaris needs quite a few more tricks up its sleeve by then. I hope Oracle doesn't drop the ball.
There is also a trend to use variablename_ instead, a subtle change, but feels a bit better.
ACLU Pizza (Privacy) Campaign
The Webkit user agent string already mentions like 5 other browsers/render brands, I think that may be considered enough mentioning.
Would pick Dragon's Den over Shark Tank any day. Although both shows try to be very dramatic, Dragon's Den at least has a hint of plausibility in the deals.
The big failing of DVCSen is that you lose the ability to do fine-grained ACLs on code. For example, if a company wants to restrict access to certain parts of their codebase (eg, megacorp brings in contractors, they should see only the one tiny part of the code they work on), you can do that in svn, whereas with git you can't give them access to part of a repository. Heck, you can even integrate your ACLs with Active Directory if you have enough LDAP/Apache config fu.

Also, it makes pointy-hair types more comfortable to have a central server where everything is obviously canonical.

I don't think DVCS will ever fully supplant centralized systems (including Subversion, Perforce, and whatever else people use these days) in the corporate world.
Robin Hanson has some citations in this post: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/05/econ-neglects-licensin...
What confuses me in Ruby is that functions and executable blocks (or what they are called) seem to be different things.

So def my_fun(a,b,c) is different from {|a,b,c|...}

I find it very confusing and as a matter of fact, I can not remember what I have to instantiate when to pass around (there is a Proc object, but does it refer to a fn or a block? And what would be the name for the other thing?).

Just a reminder that shortness is not the only criterion - it also has to be intuitive/logical.
Ch-ch-ch-changing 2009 Oil Demand Forecasts
Wages Grow for Those With Jobs, New Figures Show
In that regard, is it art?
I'm also surprised people are still arguing about this. I switched to Git so long ago I sometimes need to look at the man pages for SVN when I use it because I've forgotten how to do some things. IMHO unless you have a good reason to use SVN, you really should be using some kind of DVCS. SVN compared to Git/Mercurial/etc is like nano compared vim or emacs.

I do definitely consider "I'm already using SVN and I'm happy" to be a completely valid reason to use SVN because people should be free to use what they like.

But if that is your line of thought, keep in mind that you are making a concious decision to continue with a much less powerful tool and are not taking advantage of something that, if you put the time into learning it, would benefit you.
More interesting details here: http://thirdcog.eu/pwcblocks/

You get read-only access to stack variables, read-write access to stack variables defined with __block, and you have to copy the block explicitly to the heap if you want to call it outside of its scope, and then manually free it.
There's a long discussion in the comments about how to automate the milk, but most of them are wrong.

The goal is to raise the level of the milk on the model by, let's say, 1mm and take a snapshot. In fact the method of adding 3 tbs for each picture is wrong - because adding 3tbs may raise the milk level by less than 1mm when the current section of the model is thin and more than 1mm where the model has a thick profile. If you're doing it by hand, you want a scale on the side of the container and you should add enough milk to raise by 1mm for each photo.

More wrong answers: You can't use a pump with a constant rate, for the same reason as above. Using a screw drive alone doesn't do that either, because if you lower by 1mm the milk rises more than 1mm, and has the same variance-due-to-thickness problem.

Right answers: Someone proposed a black bar on the side of the tank, and a pump with constant rate of flow. That's not a bad idea - you can use the height of the black bar in the photos to judge what the current milk height is, and use that as the z position for the current heightmap.

If your heightmaps must be evenly spaced, there's one more right answer - use a screw drive to lower the model into the milk and a drainhole halfway up the container and a pump to maintain the level of the milk. Now when you lower by the model by 1mm the level of the milk rises by 1mm on the model.

Did I miss another right answer?
> Currently the barrier of entry is too high and I guess too few people are deep enough

Thing is, through checking out Django I realized you don't really need to be "deep enough" to contribute to that stuff. The thousand-cut effects applies, and when you're trying to make heads or tails of the doc, you're bleeding from these thousand cuts so you know and understand the doc's pain points. If doc contribs are first-class, then right as you understand the issues and what the doc tries to say, you'll be steered towards opening a documentation bug (and maybe even contributing a patch) for that part.

Maybe it's just doing to be a bit of wording, maybe it'll be a link or two to other relevant parts of the doc; maybe it'll be things you'll have figured through your sweat and tears, maybe something you'll have learned by asking a question on IRC.

But even as a beginner, you'll have added a little stone and made the doc slightly better through your current understanding. And it's enough.

I barely contributed to Django myself, but my first ever contrib was simply pointing out that the `now` tag's format character `n` produced an RFC 2822 date, not an RFC 822 one as written in the doc at the time. It was almost nothing, but it still very slightly improved the documentation for the next guy reading it, and it actually made me feel involved in the project. Even though I didn't have anywhere near the knowledge of the codebase to contribute to the code itself.

edit: and re the thousand cuts effect, that's the great thing about making beginners contribute: "old timers" don't notice or remember these small issues (which pile up), because they fill in he blanks or missing parts through their knowledge.
A better way to state this is that if you are a good cook you are willing to spend more on a quality sharp knife.
If you aren't a good cook you'll probably buy the serrated surgical steel knife from the guy in the mall because it's only 19.95 and will "stay sharp for life".

Lisp has a cost for useage. Higher learning curve, Different way of thinking about patterns. Harder to use correctly at first. It's worth it for the "good cook" to pay the cost. Maybe not for the everyone else.

(as an aside I love my expensive set of high quality knives. and always feel handicapped when I have to cook without them. But they did cost a small fortune)
> On the server side, we use dtrace, zfs & zones on all Unix-like servers & have been happy with the result. I'd hate to have to move to Linux & loose those features.

Well, Linux has dtrace analogs/contenders (no idea how functional, never used them), there's btrfs coming along (meanwhile, you can survive with LVM and md RAID), and there's VServer, even with grsecurity patches if you're freaky that way.

> For desktops? I don't know & don't care, really.

Well, if I can't get OS X I make do with XP or Linux. Nice UI and multihead support plus hardware acceleration are my requirements here.
For quite a while, Apple were jerks about contributing there changes back. The patches they submitted to KHTML were huge, undocumented, and full of OSX-specific code. It tooks many months of griping by KHTML, GPL advocates and the community before Apple opened up thier KHTML fork as a CVS repo, and some time later, simply open-sourcing Webkit itself. But at the beginning, it was quite a fight to get Apple to acknowledge Webkit's open-source roots.

The KDE project has now dropped KHTML and switched to Webkit.
Because Perl's OO stuff is screwed up and has now private/public/protected distinction I used a _ and __ convention for protected and private member variables.

e.g.

$object->{this_is_public}
$object->{this_is_protected_}
$object->{this_is_private__}
how about "what postcode am I in"? when out and about.

also "click on the map, what's the postcode?"

quite handy for getting the area code i.e N1
The performance hit of a GC is less than the hit of a language that wasn't designed to be compiler-friendly. Scheme or CL will perform better than scripting languages.

You don't need really hard problems before the benefits of a language with macros become obvious. SQL-driven web apps are a lot easier to write if you have macros, for example: http://brl.codesimply.net/brl_4.html#SEC31
"When you test the IQ of people by university subject, you generally find that the hard sciences have the highest IQs (physics and math at the top) followed by the social sciences followed by the artsy stuff."

"[T]he artsy stuff?" Another good indicator of high IQ is not being completely dismissive of things that you have no experience in. Try it out.
> Maybe they're spending so much time blogging because git really is that good?

That may be, but they're the only community I see being extremely in-your-face about their tool and how it's clearly beating the pants off everything else. Personally, I'd be more interested why they feel the need to declare its goodness so loudly, when if it really is as awesome as these articles make it sound then it'll spread like wildfire by word of mouth.

emacs changed the way I write code, and made me wildly efficient compared to before I used it. That doesn't mean I'm going to go and start browbeating people into using it. The git community seems to be blind to the notion that git (as wonderful as it is) might not be for everyone.
I read the point as "doing a high speed exercise makes your brain have to work at a faster rate". Sprints being the example chosen as increasing the brain processing speed. Which is quite interesting because there are other activities that require high speed mental abilities. Playing an instrument in a thrash metal band for one. According to this theory, a member of Megadeth would be a faster thinker than a classical musician. Interesting thought.
You can do ACL with a DVCS by way of a pre-receive hook. It's just a matter of time before tools make this dead-simple.
I suppose that the first step to "getting fit", or in other words living a wellness oriented lifestyle, is to actually define what this means to you in your world. My belief is that "change" starts from within, which means that you can eat all of the right food and exercise on a consistent basis, and still not be "well." The change that I was referring to is the space between your eyes, controlling how you think, also known as tangebalizing (I made this word up) your thoughts. Can you imagine having the literally controlling how you think and how you perceive a situation? Because you can and the first step to eliciting change is realizing that you were born with all of the tools to evoke this type of result...
The only useful naming convention was described by Bjarne Stroustrup in his C++ book: "capitalize type names, don't capitalize anything else".

If you want to prefix your private members with "_", you are using the wrong IDE (or the wrong language, like here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826119). If you want to prefix sanitized variable names with "s", you should find a better way of sanitizing them and read less of Joel. If you want to name hard-working method like "DistinctRequests", remember that you are "hiding behind your names" and contradicting yourself at once.
nmap is a little heavyweight at times, it's the swiss army knife, while netcat is more like a simple blade.

Sometimes it's meaningful to avoid telnet because of the terminal negotiation it does. Other times, telnet is useful because it can do line buffered input, allowing line edits (I often mistype the protocol version string when testing HTTP directly).
I love you

Well I don't know if I love you but you sound like somebody I could love.
I agreed with the first two sentences of your original post. People waste entirely too much time writing about git vs svn.

However, you are absolutely wrong here. The blub argument is not that you must use git to have a valid opinion about git. It is that you must grok the power of the features. You could have a reasonable background of modern version control by using Mercurial, DARCS, BitKeeper, etc, even if it didn't inform you perfectly about what git can do (rebase -i anyone?). However if you've only used SVN or CVS then you are completely in the dark. I'm sorry but it's the indisputable truth. It's like someone who's never programmed in anything but Java, explaining how LISP macros are of no use to them. As if they would even know what a macro could do for them.
Cucumber + Python
yes that is the point. power == doing what would take 3 other programs to do.
Ask HN: Former Co-Workers Jumping Ship?
I recently resigned from my job and at my former place of employment, there are two co-workers who would like to "jump ship" from the company and join me in my new venture as co-founders. They don't see a future with that company and do not want to be a part of it any more.

I have not asked nor pressured them to make that decision, though these individuals are people whom are talented and whom I respect and who I think I would be blessed to have as co-founders.

My question is, could this open up legal trouble for me? My former boss is someone who is likely to get on the phone with his lawyer as soon as he hears the news (if they do proceed to join me) and could have the desire to cause trouble.

What are everyone's thoughts?

Disclaimer: I'm aware that you guys/girls aren't lawyers, I'm just looking for some insight and maybe some thoughts on situations like this that you've seen before. (And if you are a lawyer, even better!)
Still generalizing IMHO.

Nano fits a whole raft of use cases. For a lot of things, it's better and more suited than vim or emacs.

Similarly, a whole load of use cases, svn is more suited to the task at hand than git is.
Anyone else find it ironic that the slides are displayed in Flash?
Is it possible to pull out a portion of a project and then serve that as the canonical branch for the contractors? After the contractors git to their hearts content, could someone blessed to commit to a "master" then push only those changes or is that something that will not work?

I haven't used much git but they tout it as a very flexible system so I am wondering if it is flexible enough to accommodate this type of constrained work flow.
How is 2.x dead? Everyone in the Python community is using and developing for 2.x. If you develop for Py3k, then you loose backward compatibility and you can't use upcoming optimizations like Unladen Swallow.

I think Python might end up in a situation like PHP4 and PHP5 - where tons of people still use PHP4, even if PHP5 holds tons of improvements and is around 5 years old.

Breaking backward compatibility to fix some essential things is an ok move, but I think it's only going to work if Python3k has a much better offering than it currently has.
Ubuntu help: Finding answers fast
I checked out the program they have planned on a recent Madrid visit, and this is the real deal. Congrats to Madrid for having such an awesome program available to them!
I made the same pleasant discovery at the Lisp conference in MIT this Spring. Face to face, lispers were much more respectful, polite and welcoming than one could have expected from following online lisp forums.
This is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life!
I don't feel any pain.

Have you asked your colleagues if your use of svn is causing them pain?

Or maybe you don't have colleagues. If you don't, that's fine. I used to work mainly by myself, and back then I thought as you do. Live and let live, I said. Choose the tool that works for you, I said. Hell, use CVS if you really want to, I said.

But now I work at a company that uses svn. And my coworkers' lack of productivity is also my lack of productivity. Every week or so there's some annoying issue: Programmer A doesn't commit the fix right away, because they made that fix in the middle of some other set of changes that would otherwise break the build, and they don't want to take the time to disentangle things. Programmer B commits to Branch Q, which is bad because the third-party svnmerge tool has been set to pull from Branch P to branch Q and not the other way around. And that's assuming there is a branch Q, because even with svnmerge everyone is scared to death of making branches. It's just so painful to reconcile them later.

So ultimately you have to make a choice: Are you going to sit around and allow your colleagues to waste time on your team's behalf? Or are you going to try to raise the bar a little by forwarding them an article about a tool that might solve the team's problems? Or are you going to quit and get a job with a company full of people who care about their tools?

P.S. For the record: Everyone at my own company is well aware of git, and bzr for that matter. But you're right: There are more urgent things to do in life than tinker with your VCS, so switching isn't a priority. And, as others will point out, there are little things about SVN, built up during its decade-long history, that haven't made it into git yet, and one of those might be a showstopper. So we may be gritting our teeth for a while yet.
That's commit-time ACLs. I'm talking about read ACLs. Some companies aren't comfortable with giving people total access to code, even code that logically would sit in a single git repository.
Not really - until there's a good Keynote -> JavaScript converter we've got to play the hand that we've been dealt. I actually built one a while back that converted a PDF into a series of images then gave them a simple slideshow:
http://ejohn.org/blog/easy-pdf-sharing/

It worked 'ok' but it didn't maintain any of the embedded links. I kind of gave up since it's an imperfect solution.
I really think if you plan on programming for more than a year, the learning curve for Scheme or CL is worth it.

I was at the jQuery conference this past weekend, and a lot of the functional programming concepts would be way easier for people to understand if people saw them in Scheme first.
... and I'm absolutely aware of what git can do.
I'm not making an uninformed choice here, I know the fun things git can do, and I'm sure if I switched to git, I'd probably spend all day playing with its awesome features, then I'd probably write a blog post proclaiming how awesome it is.

Or, I could just continue using svn which perfectly fits my use case and does everything I need it to do. As I say, it stays out of my way and doesn't take any of my time up.

You seem to assume everyone uses revision control in exactly the same way and that everyone has exactly the same needs/pain points/etc
Well, sure, but that's not usually what people are talking about when they mean closures.
Radio's Regulatory Roadblocks - How the FCC slows new wireless technologies
Mercurial and Git currently have no support for checking out part of the tree. It's been designed a couple of times for Mercurial, but never implemented.

(Git people: please correct me if that's changed since I looked last, a cursory Google search indicates this problem is unsolved as yet)
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I'm pretty sure the improvement he was talking about is "full" anonymous functions (w/ multiple statements & everything).
> Wish people would quit with the "Tool X is always better than Tool Y".

Most of the time, I would agree with you. In this case, DVCS is a superset of VCS, so it is _always_ better.
You must not look too closely, because colors get visible

That happens with any anti-aliasing. After using a Mac for some time, what bothers me about ClearType to no end is that for some fonts, the colors are painfully visible without looking closely. Without exaggeration, it looks like shit smeared on the text.
no, just providing more info, the author linked to Bentley's text for further reference so I was filling in the back story.
Hear hear!

Versioning is about 1/10th of software engineering, and it's about 1/1000th of running a successful startup.

I wonder how many companies managed to survive in the bad old dark ages before we had git? </sarcasm>

This incessant cheerleading is obnoxious. Source control is simply not that much of a time sink (or shouldn't be) to warrant all this attention.

Work on making something people want, folks. Stop getting all wrapped up around the axle about some nifty new wizzbang tool.
Ask whether using a scripting language in your app with scripts embedded in the bundle, not downloaded is a violation of top-secret section 3.3.2.

http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/286...
Your reading comprehension is lacking. I didn't say intelligent. I said 'think faster', which is true:

"Nerve conduction velocity (NCV) has been shown to increase in response to a period of sprint training."
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/adis/smd/2001/00000031...

When you sprint, your brain must fire every signal, and process every step so you can keep your balance. Sprinting is, by definition, running as fast as you can, which also means running as fast as your brain can process it. By training it, you train your brain to think at a higher speed than it normally would.
China doesn't have the nicest foreign policy on the planet

The Chinese policy of non-interference in foreign affairs has shocked people who look at Chinese relationships with N. Korea and Burma. However, I personally feel that Chinese foreign policy is no worse than that of Britain, France or America.