skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no horse in this race, I'm just using and liking Sinatra as a "sandbox framework" to go along with our Rails deployment. So, with that said:

Sell me on Ramaze. I love that I can whip out a 2-file application in Sinatra --- one file for the Ruby and templates, and another for the jQ js that'll run on the client. What does Ramaze do better than Sinatra for me?
Because sometimes they're almost the price of the real thing, except I don't know if I'll have them in a couple years (with DRM) and there's no way for me to lend them to friends.
Bad marketing, mostly. But that's another topic for another time. Suffice it to say that wondering about that very thing helped me to learn a lot about marketing and economics.
I wonder when HN will be cashflow positive :-)
Hawks has a great blog at http://johnhawks.net/

And Cochran and Harpending, the "Utah colleagues" mentioned in the article, have already written a book about this accelerated human evolution: http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accele...
Ask HN: where to ask trivial programming questions
Greeting

I am trying to learn programming on my own but find myself getting stuck a lot. For example, I just wrote the simple maxLine program from K&R as an exercise, the compiler, gcc, gives me the following error when I define a symbolic constant MAXLINE=1000 in the code, but happily compiles the code when I use int 1000 directly:

maxLine.c:21: error: expected expression before ‘=’ token

so my question is, is there a good website/mail group where I can get help on these kind of issues, something very trivial to experts but could take me hours to figure it out.

thanks
Most errors of reasoning in humans are the result of our evolutionary background, there is no reason to expect these in a machine intelligence, even in one less intelligent than a human. It is not even necessary that a different set of systematic errors will be present, though that is a possibility.
How are we supposed to police our fellow hackers? In my mind there's no way to ensure that this "blacklist" stays objective, and people don't abuse it for their own advantage (or for mischief!)
I was actually in the middle today of writing an essay about why Facebook isn't a fad, to counter that attitude a bit. I knew they had improved their revenue significantly, but I was under the impression that they had a ways to go.
Facebook is most likely least popular in the tech industry, where people are more into "cutting-edge" sites or rely on older tools like email. That's why there's such an oft-lopsided view of them on HN.
> and a very, very large install base for the client runtime.

You are underetimating this. For evrything else, (air, java, Qt, C#) I have to start a new app. My firefox is always on.
Nah, web 2.0 was about the power of the social mind and collectivism. Facebook was actually one of the first sites to reject that mindset and focus on walling off their users. When I wrote for AllFacebook in 2006 I think I actually wrote something arguing they were closer to Tim O'Reilly's idea of web 3.0 or the semantic web, wherein all information is easily related to other information.
A lot? There's about two lines I'd consider "boiler plate" (three if you count the import)

from optparse import OptionParser

parser = OptionParser() # initialise parser
parser.add_option(...) # add option 1
parser.add_option(...) # add option 2
(options, args) = parser.parse_args() # run parser, get values

..and the sample add_option call:

parser.add_option(
"-q",
"--quiet",
action="store_false",
dest="verbose",
default=True,
help="don't print status messages to stdout")

I don't see anything repetitive, nor unnecessarily object-oreiented
Adobe to buy Web-services firm for $1.8 billion
Considering Amazon apologized for the removal and offered $30 to the people they offended, I think they've shown their intent is not to blindly remove things, and I doubt they'd get away with trying. Furthermore, the DRM is easy to crack.
What about something like..

defaults = load_stored_config_to_dict('example.conf')

parser.add_option(
"-q",
"--quiet",
action="store_false",
dest="verbose",
default=defaults['quiet'],
help="don't print status messages to stdout")
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized
Groupon's Four Keys to Customer Interaction
http://www.stackoverflow.com
This buyout doesn't make a ton of sense. Hopefully adobe is buying it to make the flash integration better since ad tracking is so important and omniture never worked great with flash.
There's nothing all that special about it. If all your friends/acquaintances are on it then it's great, otherwise it's not that useful. If all my friends were on twitter then I'd probably be using that instead.
Yes, and I was told by someone that once worked for EY that their price was the only selling point. In other words, their product wasn't better, but their price made a lot of folks believe that it was.

If they hadn't charged more than everyone else and hired Ezra and a few other community luminaries, they'd be just another niche hosting company.
Hmm, how about this for craftsmanship then?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAA8ht4hbhA (sculptor who works on the scale of the top of a pin or the eye of a needle).
Is their revenue entirely ad based?
You mean this?

http://www.leopardautomobile.com/
Microsoft's "Next-Generation Newspaper" Looks Like TweetDeck
I definitely didn't see this one coming.
Khosla: Don't rush to market - focus on greater innovation
Do you mean HN or YC?
UV-B sunlight strikes a substance on the skin called
7-dehydrocholesterol converting it into vitamin D3. The vitamin D created by this reaction is then reabsorbed by the skin and enters the bloodstream. Apparently some new research indicates reabsorption may take up to 48 hours!

Melanin inhibits the above reaction, so blacks need more sun to get the same amount of vitamin D.

More details:
http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Vitamin-D.html
I know that in this thread I'm playing the part of the outspoken Facebook fanboy, but: They entered a market competing against a site that was at a time the fourth-most used site on the planet, and in three years usurped its position, introduced an entirely new paradigm to how web sites worked, swiftly and mercilessly eliminated the trend towards theme personalization, redefined their design three times, added a slew of features that were ripped off by every site around them, and did it all without compromising its theme of "We know what we're doing, fuck you" and generally being right.
I agree. Even IE8 would be better than nothing.
I think Tcl is ideal for writing domain-specific formats, e.g. file formats that require a few custom constructs but would still benefit from essentially an entire programming language to help with specification.

I also think Tk is a major strength, though I always preferred Perl's interface to it.

Despite these strengths, I don't like Tcl as a language. It's not that its syntax isn't without certain charms (brevity being one), but it has a few flaws that I consider fatal:

1. It is far too easy to make the mistake of inlining a list. This can result in arguments being passed in the wrong order, or partial lists being processed when it "seems like" the whole list has been read, etc. This is a very hard problem to debug.

2. The Tcl interpreter does not trace blocks very well. It usually points you to the line of the last curly brace in a half page of nested constructs, which tells you almost nothing about where an error is.

3. While it's very easily bound to C, it has no concept of objects. So Tcl APIs seem to require constant re-querying; for example, rather than "set x [expensive_get_operation a b c]" followed by "[x do_y]" and "[x do_z]", APIs tend to look like "[expensive_y a b c]" and "[expensive_z a b c]". All other advantages to objects are, similarly, lost.

Of course, Tcl has been evolving fairly rapidly lately, and 8.5 addressed a number of serious annoyances. Maybe my perception is out of date; if so, please enlighten me.
People forget the emotional attachment we can have to things like books, works of art, etc. I have books that are over 100 years old (gotta love sales at old libraries!). I love feeling the paper and wondering about all the people who have read those books, deciphering the little notes on the pages and thinking about who wrote them. They're my little bits of history. Not to mention that rummaging through old used book stores is a great way to spend an afternoon.

Even for travel I don't see the worth. I tend to avoid taking expensive things on trips and even then, travel is an opportunity to see what there is to read and learn about the location I arrive at rather than what I can take with me.

The Kindle surely has applications, but for me they are severely limited.
Part of the problem is the terrible name, "SQL Injection". I've heard it referred to by another term, something like "subverting the structure of the sql statement" (no, it's not as catchy). Even just calling it that gives a much more fundamental insight into the problem - it's not about always escaping apostrophes, it's about making sure the query parses in exactly the way you intend. Looking at the problem that way, you see that 1) there are obviously similar attacks possible against most query languages (LDAP, XPath, whatever) and 2) separating the query structure from the arguments (as tptacek describes) is key to avoiding the problem.
They also let users send virtual gifts to one another for really low prices.
Yes, I personally removed Addthis from my website. Social bookmark sharing isn't worth the extra overhead. And Sharethis is even worse than Addthis.
I understand what you mean and I can respect not wanting to dig too deep into java, we are talking about two different things here I think development and deployment. autoconf is great for someone who just wants to install something from source as simple as possible, it is also consistent across projects, making it a nobrainer to install with. I would love to have a simpler environment in clojure, it not even trivial to start the repl.
I know Adobe, but I don't know Omniture. This may be a dumb question, but what do they do?

And how does this mesh with Adobe's product line? Based upon initial comments, it looks like this may be the bigger question.
A 32x32 PNG would not be that much larger than a 16x16.
For the exact reason I stated: portability. Bitmaps are good for some things, but logos aren't really one of them.
James Webb Space Telescope Begins To Take Shape
Omniture's main product is web analytics software (a hosted solution)

They're trying to move that model into more traditional apps as well. Like tracking flash or AIR apps, they even do some analytics on some connected game consoles.

On the surface its a strange fit.
It was a joke, since the goal of HN is not to make money. It wasn't very well received though...
No. HTML has no reason to specify information that has meaning to display technologies we happen to use now. Subpixel anti-aliasing is based on current LCD technology and doesn't even deal with newer approaches such as the PixelQi screen that equips the OLPC laptop (9 subpixels per pixel).

This solution would pollute the HTML information space.
8.6 includes some OO stuff:

http://www.markroseman.com/tcl/guide86.html

And of course, different OO systems have been available for a while.

One of the 'bad marketing' points is that having different, competing, not-installed-by-default OO systems available might be fun for people to play with, but is not fun for end users who just want to pick one and be done with it.
There were about a dozen issues uncovered using this technique. I would say the majority of them were what I would call "real" bugs, as opposed to "sure, that doesn't work but nobody cares". One example is that gmake allows $$ in variable names, as in "FOO$$BAR=abc"; at the time our parser did not handle this correctly. I did not have to create special cases to fix these bugs, at least not any more so than any other parser feature.
While similar solutions might exist out there, sacy tries to be special in its own way by providing one hell of a user experience (keep your assets linked as always, but just warp them with a special tag - sacy does the rest) and outsourcing the hard stuff (serving the file, client-side caching) to the tool that does it best: The webserver.

But I'd say that the ease-of use for development is what is really unique.
Tcl has its faults. 1) Poor DB support (TDBC is very young with so few drivers) 2) No CPAN 3) Poor support for web-development 4) Poor support for advance programming constructs
5) Dry community

Its not just Marketing, Tcl is just not as exciting as Haskell, Erlang, Ruby or even R!
David Byrne imagines his ideal city
earlier thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824657
I really respect Adobe for its acquisition acumen.
But in this case we're talking about a logo that's going to appear a few pixels wide on all clients - there's really no incentive to add the overhead of a large file transmission (not to mention the requisite client-side processing).

In a everything-is-made-of-marshmallows ideal world, yeah, bandwidth is not an issue, nor is site load time, and client-side CPUs and RAM are infinite. In that world I too would transmit everything, no matter how minor, in vector form. We do not live in that world.
Yeah, no kidding. Plus, adobe doesn't seem to have the money up front- remember, they asked their staff to take unpaid vacation this year-- this seems like a very strange way to say 'screw you' to their investors.
I have a MJ poster with those words. Love it.
Hypothesis: adobe is the content-creation-tools company (and has flash).

Omniture+Adobe leads to: deeply integrated content+analytics, eg the ability to author web or flash content with very fine-grained data capture and analytics.
Are there easily accessible motors that could drive a train that small?
I once joked that HN could be sold like Reddit, and someone said it was a fair idea.
It's the ultimate car for Larry Ellison.
> ... marketing ... exciting

That sounds exactly like a marketing problem. The other things are actually technical problems that are more or less correct, but that haven't necessarily stopped other languages from doing ok. I mean, look at Erlang, for instance. It does a few things very well, and other things in it are fairly ugly. And yet, warts and all, it's certainly worth studying, and utilizing for certain classes of problem.

Another example: Tcl has more or less got i18n/unicode/utf8 and threads right for years, whereas Ruby has struggled with those same issues. Every language/implementation has strengths and weaknesses, and part of what 'marketing' is, is getting the language into the hands of people who will do well with its strengths, and also gathering data from the 'market' in order to determine what needs improving/fixing.

BTW, the Tcl community is excellent. Very friendly people, very welcoming and approachable.
On the Unusual Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science [ps]
Some stats to consider:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Yes, informed consent and other nonsense underpininning freedom and democracy be damnned.

And please, let's ignore how industrial-scale farming makes it difficult for agricultural societies to escape poverty. It doesn't apply to everyone, but there are large numbers of people who can grow a surplus of food without requiring large amounts of capital. Unfortunately that food is all but worthless becuase they have to compete with the substantal direct and indirect subsidies industrial agriculture enjoys. The result is that they can't generate extra money that could help them through lean years, or that they could invest in education or equipment that would help them move up.
NASA's Mars Rover Might Be Stuck For Good
Recommendation UK Start Up Law Firm
Hi I discovered your site after I came across an article http://zanesafrit.typepad.com/zane_safrit/2009/08/10-legal-tips-for-your-startups.htm

As for myself I am setting up an Ecommerce site and am seeking legal counsel. I was wondering whether you knew of anyone that you could recommend based in London?

Many thanks,

Mardi
It hit me that they designed a course which a 10 year old would have little problem completing, but it's very difficult for an AI, and they did it on purpose. Why?! AIs can be great at things we suck, not just at what we can do easily, and they're much more useful this way. This seems very counterproductive for the future of useful AI.
Because the HTML/JS platform is only getting nicer. Almost everyone is already dumping fat clients for web clients, even in the enterprise, and it started way before AJAX was even heard of.

The advantages of a fat-client client/server app are low latency of the UI, maybe development speed given the right toolset, plus definitely flexibility of the UI for graphics and complicated interactions. Disadvantages though are difficulty of deployment, client platform restrictions, distributing updates/patches.

Whereas the traditional web thin client is easy deployment to your users across different platforms, via your single installation on the server. The disadvantage of traditional web clients is that you're restricted in UI complexity and latency is high. But this hasn't stopped so many enterprise and web apps being written (and rewritten) for the web, just to get deployment/update simplicity in place of a fat client.

So if you can build a complex UI fat client with low latency and the deployment ease of a web app, you're having your cake and eating it too. I think it really could be different, this time.
Could you please elaborate? I dont know anything about investment banking, but i would like to learn why that style of execution is a bad idea.
They did make the theme-personalization mistake with the initial apps implementation, but they reeled it back in fairly well.
"added a slew of features that were ripped off by every site around them"

Yeah...that knife cuts both ways, doesn't it?
Sept. 15, 1947: Association for Computing Machinery Gets Whirring
>and those folks who lived near a boundary between two different ethnic groups would hardly ever interbreed with the others

If you are talking about prehistory, how can you know this?
Welcome Mardi. Someone here might be able to help you but I suggest you provide some more details about your business to make the most of your time here.
I'll add two more data points to 6% being a reasonably small amount.

1 - I had a great mentor years ago. His software company, which is still running strong for 20 years, gave 5% to each of several key employees (they had good salaries as well). He thought it a no-brainer and his success shows it.

2 - I had an investor in '98; things went sideways. The investor received both IT product/services from my startup plus 5% of my company in return for carrying my costs that year. When it became clear we needed to part ways, I called my old mentor to ask what to do. He told me to let the partner keep the 5% even if I didn't have to (I didn't and didn't even have to fight about it). He told me it was a small amount, it would get diluted over further investments and if those further investments never materialized, it meant the company is dying so the 5% is worthless anyway.
'gifts' being 64x64px icons that have been curated by Facebook staff.
That is amazing, make sure to scroll down to the zoomed in "ipsum dolor."
> Also, If I was to in any way publicly denounce another person it would probably have more negative effect on me than them :)

Well, not if your story is legit. Airing out your concerns about another coder sounds perfectly alright to me.
Audi’s EV Delivers 3,319 Pound-Feet of Torque
Why should anyone be telling me what format decisions I make in the end? If SVG is right for the job, I'll use SVG. If it isn't, I won't. We do have a choice, here.
Maybe Adobe will invest a few bucks in making the code/documentation behind Omniture's tracking system less like beholding something from an H.P. Lovecraft novel.
Scribblenauts:  taking emergent gaming to the extreme
Someone please explain the difference between this a FB's Platform. My guess - Prototypes = useful extensions of FB and Apps = fun & games?
Wait, Rackspace is more expensive than their EngineYard costs, which were free.

And, actually, processing credit cards yourself is cheaper than PayPal, but there's the setup step that takes time and up-front costs.

And your last analogy is really faulty, Dustin. If you need more seats, your needs have changed. Then you re-evaluate the options based on your new criteria. That's what Github did.

Man, I thought I got through to you during our train ride. :)
Probably something like "show me the oil and tell me what the extraction and production costs are."

What people like you who like to build peak oil straw men conveniently either fail to remember or consistently overlook is that the modern argument for peak oil is an economic argument. It is an argument about the amount of oil that can be extracte at a price people are willing to pay. It is not an argument that we've burned up all the oil that exists on/in earth.
At this time FanGamb is not providing prizes. We've found that most users treat this like any other fantasy sports league or march madness pool where all players ante up something on their own. But all of that is handled offline totally separated from the site itself.
Facebook's adopting Twitter's ideas are different. I'm actually in the middle of writing why now; I'll post the link here if you'd be interested in my argument.
Don't be sorry, I was wrong. Diffractive lenses are used in camera lenses to correct chromatic aberration from refractive lenses, so I sloppily equated the two. Thanks for your clear explanation!

It is true about the prismatic color-shifting, though - I have one on the desk so that was an observation rather than a hypothesis.
How many of you document your work in anything resembling this manner? At my company we do project books, but we also make physical products so there are a lot more physical artifacts to photograph. I can imagine screens of JS getting old after a bit.

That said it would be cool to see some documentation of software products. From concept to wireframes to UI to deployment with "director's commentary" on the code along the way.

The TapTapTap guys teased at this with their "Convert" UI video:

http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/convert-design-evolution/

If nothing else it would be extremely gratifying for team members and useful training tools for new additions.
quote of the week ( which comes from this article ):

One guy asked me ‘Havent you ever passed arguments in the wrong order and expected a different return than what you got ?” and I’ll be honest: No, I haven’t. But for people who have a hard time getting arguments order and return types right, this system is a great help. So it has it’s place, I must say.
The idea that my not paying to feed the poor in broken African countries is really in their best interests is far too convenient for my liking.

I prefer to acknowledge that I care less about their plight than my own values.
$56,995 and no engine, ouch! impressive car but looks like a factoryfive to me
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/08/19/turning-off-the-distra...

We're actually pretty close to this (just soft-launched our windows version-- mac version hot on its heels). Starting with focus "toggling" ("Shut of the bad parts of the internet for 30 minutes") and moving on to nudges ("let me know when I exceed 30m of news time") and blocking ("block social networking if I exceed X hours or X %").

Disabling the internet is a baby/bathwater thing for a lot of people, I think. There's too much value there to turn it off completely (research, etc).
Because Ellison demands perfection from his engineers or because then they'll know why Oracle software costs so much?
It doesn't work in GNOME terminal. Probably because the bash should be in so called emacs mode (not sure about emacs mode, but there surely is vim mode for bash). Anyone knows the reason?
Google Chrome 3.0 - First Look:
US Women are More Egocentric and Narcissistic than Ever, According to Research