skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it feels like WWW is a kind of product that is worth designing better. why not take a little longer to make it simpler and more extensible? it doesn't mean it has to be built by a huge committee fighting over standards and trying to include every kitchen sink anyone wants, but it does seem more like a public good than some company's product.

as for "duct tape," maybe it conflates two concepts? i personally think "fast and simple" and "fast and crap" are two different ballgames. my first projects were over my head, so i built crap. then i built crap faster. these are good for throwaway demos, maybe prototypes.

at some point building crap became slow. good design simplifies problems. good abstractions and good framworks make it easier to add more with less code. it's faster to add features, and much less buggy. the upfront cost to building the first feature takes a bit longer to get right, but upon a strong foundation one can really roll. it's like being bound by linear v constant time. when one considers handling bugs in crap code, the worst case becomes exponential time.

i guess what i'm saying is that the complexity of the solution should be appropriate for the entire situation: the developer skillset and prior experience, the scope of the project, the time available, the importance of iteration, extensibility and maintainability, etc.

duct tape is good, but you still have to figure out where to draw the line between overzealous copy-pasting and meta-programming.
Are you sure there might not still be sensitive information in the file system journal on some file systems?
So, as someone potentially in the market for a new laptop, which brand (if any) would you guys recommend?
Will you buy a Zune HD?
GitHub's Architecture, before and after migration
Terracotta isn't peer-to-peer; it requires one or more management-ish servers. However, it does offer persistence on those servers, so one could use Terracotta in place of a database. Also, Terracotta works in the (historically) Spring-like way of not requiring any modification to an existing codebase. One declares which objects ought to be distributed, and magic just happens (supposedly, I've only been reading up lately). Terracotta does bytecode manipulation on those object references and on Java synchronization blocks to achieve what is explicitly specified with this system.

Another project to look into is JBoss's recently re-branded and improved cache:

http://www.jboss.org/infinispan

I've been thinking about a problem lately that will likely require one of these technologies, so I've been especially curious.
In theory, one could write clean, beautiful, intention-revealing code that specifies a language, while the JIT generator handles all the hard parts of making it fast.

It's not a theory. Squeak Smalltalk has been doing exactly that for years. (Not the JIT, but specifying the interpreter in a subset language.)
Kids have always needed instruction on how to play. "be nice!" "share!" "don't hit!" I find it encouraging that we're finding ways to impart these lessons in less coercive ways.
Two laptops attach to a wi-fi hub connected to a DSL line provided by a major telco. One starts a large download. Why doesn't it completely monopolize the skinny straw that connects the 10+mb/s network it actually sees to the gigabit network beyond the DSL? Why can the second laptop start another large download and both see reasonable download speeds? At a more basic level, how do these TCP's even know how fast to drive the transfer? All they see is a multimegabit wireless network. They're not psychic, and there's no configuration box or DHCP setting for "256 kb/s dsl uplink".

That's what TCP actually buys you.

You can make a reliable UDP protocol with a few tens of lines of code. It's called "TFTP", and it's god-awful slow.
Or you can get the video leactures from here http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...
using chickenfoot in firefox:

//begin
include('~/jquery/jquery.js');
b=new Button('hide comment heads', function() {
$('.comhead').hide();
});
insert(after('add comment button'), b));
//end

click the new button injected to hide comments. can be automatically triggered whenever ff opens http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=*

you can make it fancy like toggling instead of hiding, or showing only points or authors, but it's sufficient for me (actually i use auto-hide-trigger-with-no-button which is simpler)
Don't know about anyone else, but it was pretty refreshing for me. Being new to HN, I wasn't all that familiar with the UI, and not having scores made me focus on the comments a lot more. With the points being on the upper left corner, you can't read the comment without knowing how well it did so far with other people. It's a lot like movie reviews. It may be a good indicator, and often times they are right, but it still influences you to a degree.
Its also customary to say which college you attended if they ask you "where". I also don't know anyone that says HAHHHHHHH-VARD, STANNNN-FAHD or M-AHH-TTTTT. This pseudo-snobbery is all in your head.

If you keep hiding the fact that you are from a top school in order to dissociate fallibility with Stanford, this sort of sentiment will continue.
I've always wanted to use such a technology to build a write-behind persistence mechanism. Let's say that you want your data in a relational DB (for reporting, company policy, integration, whatever) but can stand a very small risk of losing a few seconds worth in the case of a huge failure. You'd gain by avoiding the latency of network-to-db and disk forcing.

So, you write DAOs that "persist" to a queue and to a shared map(s). When you read, you look in the map first and go to the DB upon failure. Queue consumers persist messages (inserts/updates) to the db. After your application reaches a steady state, you shouldn't have to read from the DB much at all. And, you could build an eager loading mechanism for efficient start-up.

Even without async persistence, I'd prefer one of these solutions over memcached/MySQL replication hackery.
pg suggests using Vim. :)
The article didn't do much to support the "Three Felonies a Day" thesis. More support for the tired, more general "laws are bullshit" refrain, but not for the thesis in the title.
This was the most interesting thing about the "Don't tase me, bro" incident - tasers and clubs are roughly equivalent, yet a picture of someone being tasered isn't nearly as provocative as a picture of someone being beaten with nightstick. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that police would have bludgeoned that kid, but they were perfectly willing to taser him.

Thus, weapons like tasers and sound cannons increase the number of situations in which police are willing to use dangerous-though-not-usually-lethal force. Using them to quell protests is only one area where this is true, though it's probably the most notable.
Whoops, should've researched that. I guess I was too preconditioned to the idea that mathematics isn't practical (thank you, Engineer vs. Mathematician jokes).
I'm puzzled by this rejection.

"Politically charged" doesn't seem like a valid reason for rejection (because by that standard, apps like Huffington Post on the left or Drudge on the right wouldn't have a place in the app store)

I hope Apple reverses its decision (and I also hope that the rejection was an unintentional mistake)
I just got a T400 for Linux development last week, so I read this headline with not a small amount of trepidation. Fortunately I fall into the author's "Linux-powered typewriter" use case: I spend 80% of my time in fullscreen (using xmonad) bash or vim sessions, using white-on-black color schemes. For my development machine I don't really care about color fidelity or dynamic range.

The reasons I like the T400 (and many of its Thinkpad siblings) are the trackpoint ("pencil eraser" mouse device), nice keyboard layout, and hardware that works out of the box with open-source drivers. I have had some intermittent freezes on suspend/resume, which I hope are fixed soon...
Natural Gas traders love interfaces like that. My former boss did a release once, where you could do all of these incredibly impressive, perfectly orthogonal mass-changes to disparate object types. But what the users were really crazy about was the "Refresh" button he put in as a request.
They all suck. Get a desktop.

(I used to love Thinkpads, but this guy is right -- Lenovo cannot find a good supplier of screens. I heard this is because they will only use Chinese parts where possible, instead of Taiwanese, Japanese, or Korean parts. Needless to say, the Chinese cannot make LCDs.)

HP doesn't make good laptops, Dell doesn't make good laptops (they are good at making laptops whose batteries last for about 15 minutes after a few weeks or so), Apple is Apple (nice screens, same crap everywhere else), etc.

I might consider Asus next -- the eeepc 901 is the nicest laptop I've had. Nice screen. Unfortunately, the wireless card is a piece of shit that sometimes takes several tries to associate to WPA2 networks. "Known firmware issue." Great.

Basically, everyone wants cheap, cheap, cheap, and that's what they get. People that actually use computers are part of their profession and not just for watching porn are shit out of luck as a result.

(I will edit to add -- pricing things out, the desktop is an amazingly better value. For $2000, you can get a high-end Thinkpad with 2G of RAM, 2 cores, and a 160G SSD, etc. Or you can get a desktop with 8 cores, 16G of RAM, a 24" monitor, 4T of disk space, etc. Laptops are nice if you absolutely can't work at a desk. But if you can, you can save yourself a ton of money, and just use a netbook when traveling. I do this, but with a Thinkpad as my "desktop". It has not been undocked in years.)
Victory In Software Development
The really hackery thing to do would be to let people create and use custom ranking algorithms. Implementing this might be very difficult.
I have a thinkpad with a screen like the one in the review. There is no contrast between the black background and the white text (or vice-versa). It is very painful to use.

Unless you are using emacsspeak, you do not want to edit text on this thing. (Actually, the speakers are crap too, so emacsspeak is probably painful as well. Good work, Lenovo.)
The Blurring of Layer 2 and Layer 3
don't think so, batons/dogs/hoses put their struggle into a visual perspective, you see a cop whaling on someone you'll start asking if the reason they are doing it is justified.

You see someone running away from a sound cannon, you just shrug it off since you aren't experiencing it yourself
http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/9640/1254105520402.jpg

Mousing over the comment causes you to submit one like it. According to 4chan, someone in proggit found the exploit at around 22:30. -- http://zip.4chan.org/g/res/5994620.html
It's gotten worse in the last hour or so. Someone's modified the worm so that simply looking at a page with the comment will cause you to start replying to all the posts on that page. Coupled with the fact that reddit has the "red/orange envelope" feature, whereby users are notified if somebody replies to their posts, and the fact that users tend to watch for said envelope in anticipation, the site seems to be melting down.
Anyone know what this is a problem from? I've heard it's a Python Markdown vulnerability, or is it just in reddit' implementation of something?
"They all suck. Get a desktop."

I am coming to this conclusion too. How should I select a desktop monitor? Are there specific features to look for? Help a clueless-about-hardware fellow HN er!
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9oo8j/source_co...

comment this line in markdown.py

http://code.reddit.com/browser/r2/r2/lib/contrib/markdown.py...
He'd have gotten better results by paying someone to give him a good review. Marketing an audio product with a print ad? Who'd fall for that approach nowadays?

The number of people trying to sell music these days is incomprehensible. It's probably the toughest market that's ever existed - it almost has to be very personal
And if he was caught with marijuana three times, he could go to prison for life!
Go to the store and look at them?

I have had good luck with Dell; a 24" LCD and a 37" TV. Both have beautiful color rendering, good contrast, great brightness. I have had the 24" LCD for probably 5 years, and it still looks as good as the day it arrived.

I have not looked into LCDs for a while, so I don't know if Dell still makes good ones.

The best guarantee of quality is probably to buy a high-end monitor from a company that also manufactures the actual panels.
I hope they can build a fiber interface into the Magsafe jack. That way, you could have a monitor that's also a docking station, just plug in one cord! Apple's almost there as it is now. An inductive charging stand would be just as cool, especially if you could devise a data standard to work with it. Just set your laptop in the stand, and it would get power, be hooked up to the external monitor and all of the peripherals.
Pretty brilliant design. I can't wait to see 3D printers becoming a part of everyday life in the future.
Opposition to vague or unenforceable laws is not the same thing as opposition to the rule of law, in general. In fact, I think -- as, e.g., Lawrence Lessig has argued wrt copyright -- such laws might have a corrosive effect on general support for the rule of law and could be opposed on those grounds.
Ask HN: what do you view?
Besides HN, what other websites, magazines, etc. to you consistently view? Thank you.
It really wasn't a good idea to link to a page full of the 'infected' comments...
the lack of comment scores is good for the kind of person who wants to read a lot of hacker news. for the person who wants to skim it and see a couple good points mentioned about each article it made it harder.
Netflix Everywhere: Sorry Cable, You're History
pretty much you can peacefully assemble as long as noone causes trouble, the second someone starts shit, you lose your right.

i.e. this whole thing started because a couple of anarchists lit a garbage can on fire and rolled it towards the cops. At that point the cops pretty much got open season to do whatever they could to everyone around. So a peaceful protest of thousands of people can get disbanded because of a few assholes. Which would make it obvious that getting a few provocateurs is the best way to disband any protest you don't agree with.
Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content
Yep, an early comment in the submission with the pics of O'Reilly's "JavaScript: The Definitive Reference" and "JavaScript: The Good Parts" had the exploit, I didn't pay much attention, thought it was just someone screwing around with a JS snippet. Sounds like someone ran with the idea.

Hate to say it, but disabling JavaScript's the best workaround. Right now the infected comments are too prevalent to reliably avoid.
You guessed that he avoids mentioning his school by name to avoid the high expectations along with it. To operate that this guess has to be true is, at best, disingenuous.
Maybe we should wait 16 more days before we start listening to dcurtis.

Seriously though, I am confused why everyone calls the dot red... I felt pretty strongly that it is orange, but now that dcurtis backs it up... I don't know what to do.
Yep. And MetaCard was pretty cool for its time. It actually had some Lispish qualities mixed in with the cross-platform, multimedia HyperCard stuff (which was very cool on its own.) There used to be a whitepaper online that explored that aspect of it (HyperCardy 'macros',etc.) RunRev inherited all of that with the MetaCard engine, but of course now there are more compelling offerings for most things...although it's still a pretty neat multimedia tool if you're mainly targeting the desktop or CD-ROMs for some reason. I wouldn't personally use it for web stuff or DVD-ROMs anymore, though. It is flexible. I still know people who use it for everything (including CGIs ;-) ) and I know a couple of shareware developers who still make their livings using it.

I'd probably use RunRev before I used something like RealBasic, which is basically in the same market - small, 'soup-to-nuts' shareware developers who want to create desktop apps with multimedia, internet, and database capabilities. Heck, I'd use it before I used Authorware or even some of the Python tools in that general domain (PyCard, etc.) because it was faster to develop and you put out a more polished product, without cross-platform woes. The MetaCard kernel engine is actually pretty fast, execution speed-wise. It could handily beat Perl for some stuff that you wouldn't think it would even be useful for...we scripted a performance testing tool and a utility to put database records into HTML, and it trounced Perl for both tasks. Which was impressive, considering Perl would have sucked at making cross-platform multimedia apps ;-)

I almost invested in RunRev when they were first getting started...IIRC, Mike Markkula (Apple fame) did invest in them. The founder, Kevin, is pretty cool. I ended up just becoming a customer and using it as a prototyping tool. I still have an older Pro license and a couple books about RR if anyone is interested...

Anyone remember GLPro? That was another niche app we used to make prototypes and build small multimedia apps and screensavers. It had a dBase style engine in it? We used it for a screensaver once and it ended up on an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. Or iShell? That was a later one we used that was based on another defunct Apple tool. It's still around, I think. Even with the huge range of software available today, I miss working with the little, niche multimedia and audio development tools. Those are what got me into programming.
It was red originally, then orange.
Dangers of Hypnosis
More than that, but that's another story for another day.
I would reccommend this Dell monitor:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/product...

The key point is that it is LED backlit - this means much better contrast than similarly priced screens, as well as generally less power consumption.

CNET also gave it its highest-ever image-quality score, which as far as I can tell, is based on as objective of tests as they could do.

http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/dell-g2410/4505-3174_7-...
If you implement them in JS, implementing them would be easier (computation wise) than the current model.
http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/s-ips-lcd-list.php
I just keep my mouse in the right column, over the ads. Seems to work so far.
I was thinking the same thing. He could have saved himself a lot of trouble by seeing how effective or not the ad was in getting orders before printing up a bunch of CDs then he could have adjusted his marketing approach.
Good summary but you missed a critical point of serendipity. There are 230 possible symmetry groups a crystal can fall into. Franklin, as a crystallographer, knew them all. But Watson's PHD thesis involved a compound with the same symmetry as DNA, so he was much more prepared to recognize that one than Franklin was.
Sensationalism. Yet another journalistic fail attempting to brainwash the masses with political bias and facts skewed to a one-sided persuasion.

How does this stuff make it to the front page of YC News?
Thanks a lot, with dcurtis calling it red, I was about to go fiddle with some color settings.
#9 is doable and could be convenient on first dates or at conferences.

9) False number
It happens to everyone – you take the other person's number to avoid giving out yours but then they ask for a missed call. Just type in their digits and the app rings them from a false but plausible number.
Are we to believe that Rackspace plus outsourced system administration is still cheaper than Engine Yard? Impressive.
Why MacRuby Matters
I'm not sure if I like the points showing or not. In theory, I don't like them. It seems like a cheap sort of game you get sucked with comments and scores and how you feel about how many points some comment got.

On the other hand, something felt off without them. Maybe just habit.
There is not much value to speak of here but for a laptop I have been very pleased with my Envy 133- does that count as HP? I am not sure if it qualifies for being a netbook, but it is nice size for me and offers me enough performance that I can do what I need. It is not my only computer though. If using just one I would also say desktop.

http://www.voodoopc.com/#/productsenvy
"Perhaps one of the most important [recent] papers .. in evolutionary biology"
> I'd was better off saying, "Wrote code in Blub that reduced transaction processing time, resulting in greater sales of foo."

and better again by stating it as " wrote code in blub that increased sales by 25% and reduced transaction processing time by 50%"

There are probably some smaller successful sub-projects within the startup failure.
oh, man. i was all ready to vote this up until i read the article's real headline: "iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple."

i appreciate the article's submitter removing the editorial slant in the original headline, but that doesn't improve the content, i'm afraid.
The "agent provocateurs" got a whole thread on the slashdot link - it's a tactic that has been used more and more frequently, it seems. I was one of the bloggers who identified the agents in the Quebec SPP protest (look up "put the rock down man") - in that case, the ONLY violent actors were undercover police officers. It ended up being pretty funny, in a gut wrenching sort of way, with the protesters actually pacifying the police.

...but in the CMU TV video, there were no "anarchists." There were no burning trash cans. That was a different part of town, on a different night.
Developers, programmers and tech companies on Twitter
Has anyone watched it long enough to tell if it's worth an hour of watching? (al3x you don't get to vote)

[Edit: Okay, it's a pretty straightforward introduction to Scala, along with some anecdotes about how they landed there. It's good, depending on your Scala knowledge level - it may be a bit slow if you've done much Scala reading.]
United States Department of Labour: "The youth (16-24) unemployment rate was 18.5 percent in July 2009.". It was 14.0 in July 2008.

From the same source: "The employment-population ratio for young men was 52.2 percent in July 2009."

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.t02.htm

Seems like that NY Post messed up. Employment-population ratio is not the same as unemployment rate. It includes people who are in school, jail etc. - in other words, outside of work force. Those reach 13,9 million vs. 19,3 million, who are employed.
When I read this line,

Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it.

I thought it made the whole piece. It's quite clear to anyone who follows federal cases that this is exactly what is going on, and it is rather obvious why anything that enables this is perverting justice.
It's not actually a XSS problem
You know, I have seen so many intriguing-sounding books recommended and discussed here on HN - and not just on strictly 'hacker' topics. Like it says in the guidelines, "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." I want to read them. I can't keep track of them!

Would it be possible to automatically collate these books somehow, with hn-ers' comments? Maybe with check boxes for what you've already read, and integrate it with HN accounts?
I also have a D630 for work. When I am working at home and open up the downstairs HP to refer to something on a separate screen, I'm always struck by the massive difference in build quality. The HP Pavillion dv6100 feels like it's going to droop like a taffy bar when I hold it with one hand. The Dell has a good keyboard, a pointing stick, a power plug that doesn't make me worry about breaking it, and a marginally usable screen.
Three Felonies a Day is the title of the book by the featured civil-liberties lawyer. I suspect the case is made there.