skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a great idea. I love it. However, there are only two ways I can see something like that getting built: the large way or the small way. The large way would be as a tool designed to work with one of the major languages/environments. It would have to deal with all the bloatedness that implies, plus the fact that those environments were never designed to provide this sort of transparency or hackability. It would probably be a large corporate project that took years and cost millions; this probably won't happen. The small way would be because one or more hackers decided to build something new that stayed close to the hardware and was designed for this sort of thing. That's much more doable, but puts you well out of the mainstream for a long time.

I wouldn't be surprised if people eventually come around to this point of view. It will take a while, though. The current thought is that parallelism will save everything. It could take a decade before people figure out that that isn't going to happen. Maybe then there will be a renaissance of going back and rebuilding things from the ground up. But I'm rambling.

"People who are serious about software have to be serious about hardware"... that Alan Kay has a gift for putting his finger on things.
Delay-tolerant networking is a pretty old idea. (As in, well over a decade)
I Design Websites Faster Than You: Rapid Stylesheets with Blueprint CSS
In Silicon Valley, the Jobs Picture Has Changed
Ask HN: Web Language + Framework Most "Comfortable" for Desktop Coders?
Hi All,

First some background. I've been a developer for 11 years and have dabbled with pretty much everything, though my forte is system programming in C/C++ on Windows and *nix. For the past 5 years, I've been doing some light web programming on the side in the form of small- to mid-size projects in PHP, Perl, and ASP.NET.

I'm currently contemplating signing on as a cofounder for a foreign startup that I feel has a chance of really making it big, but I won't bore you with my justifications. Point is, I'm going to be the developer for this project (the other cofounders are a businessman and marketing guy).... and I need some help picking a platform.

I'm in love with C, C++, and C#. The former two for the control they give me and the latter for its clean abstractions and well-designed high-level interface. However, I can't find a web language/platform that fits with the software developer mentality.

JSP is a mess from a deployment/compatibility/maintenance perspective and totally out of the question. Most of my previous web projects have been in PHP and IMHO there's no way to maintain it past a certain point and the language itself is a nightmare, regardless of how you design the project. Besides these two, I'm open to pretty much any and all suggestions.

I've dabbled with both Python and Perl though I'd be lying to myself if I claim to be well-enough versed in either to come to a conclusion regarding their use. ASP.NET is just beautiful... except I feel it tries to apply the desktop programming paradigm too literally onto web development, and you end up with an awkward templating system with a slightly-perverted MVC model.

Basically, I want to code the system right and make it future-maintainable. From years of coding experience, I know it's not possible to make anything perfect, but you can at least make something comfortable to maintain and fun to write.. so long as you have the right tools in hand.

Can anyone recommend a Python, Perl, C#, or even C++ web development framework that works well for developers coming from the desktop (with our OOP obsession, pointer-fiddling, and OCD optimization compulsions)? I've downloaded a couple of the more popular frameworks, but if I want to do it right, it'll way too long to try them all out and do them justice without rushing to conclusions... and I'm hoping someone here has had a similar experience of coming to the web development scene from desktop programming and has some tips to offer.

Thanks!
Here is the BLS report:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/regional_reports/200908_silicon_vall...
They can also be fairly easily pulled out of PDFs, if you need it for another purpose.
Yes! That is the most amazing thing I hadn't known I wanted to have :D
It takes greasemonkey and jetpack to a whole nother level. Awesome awesome awesome! If I didn't have a very important test tomorrow I know I'd spend hours messing with firefox till nothing was left.
Headline is misleading (in the original article too). What the article says is that the phone operators are losing money on the iphone. The article says nothing about Apple, which presumably is making a ton of money.
"I've been burned a couple times by portability issues (and the way that "whatever GHC does right now" has become a de-facto standard means that portability issues are probably not a priority)"

I am interested in this issue and would love to hear more details. Portability between different Haskell implementations or portability of GHC to different operating systems?
I agree with you. They do tend to be repetitive. However, as someone who has a start-up in this area, it's nice to see it on HN every so often anyway.

Your example posts are all correct... it's just a shame that not a lot of people are aware of how 3D printers have been improving steadily over the last few years. For instance, your 'only plaster' comment... lots of people still don't know that we can print in metal, or multiple materials, or ceramic... or stem cells. Or how medicine is doing all kinds of crazy things with them. Or that costs are (and have been) dropping dramatically.

Or that they exist at all.
who cares. this is between their lawyers and Apple's.
Why should we prefer licencing to certification, if desired with protected titles so that the difference between e.g. a Software Engineer (certified) and a programmer is abundantly obvious to anyone to anyone who does the research? Likewise lawyer (passed Bar exam) and an employee of a legal services company which does the kind of routine legal services that are well within the capabilities of the average paralegal but whicg they'd be prosecuted for offering withoug the imprimatur of a J.D. now.
It's not a consensus.
Yeah, this reads like it was written by someone in the industry who's company is suffering from the inability to compete. The fact that solar power may finally become truly market-viable (as opposed to only supportable through massive subsidies) is very exciting.
… for the providers, not for Apple.
Bigger: http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/web_os_2009_large.png
> This appears to be the classic sacrifice of aesthetics for functionality.

Like Ikea furniture.
"The app will not load arbitrary game code downloads nor expose a BASIC interpreter."
Doh, didn't realize the email field wasn't public. Try now.
I read that as "Futurama."
Those are all terrible, they are all making the ridiculously incorrect assumption that it is confusing. It's possibly the only site that my Luddite family can make full use of, without ever having asked me for help.

The designs that change the layout make it less usable by preventing you from seeing everything it has to offer on one spectacularly ugly, usable page.

The design that kept mostly everything the same but modernized the colors, fonts and spacing is still worse that the current site: the current site has an effect of the design dissappearing behind the content, and the redesign has the colors and highlights push past the links and draw my attention away.
5 Reasons I'm addicted to Chrome
Wow. If you ever wanted curly braces or multi-line lambdas in Python this looks like the way to do it.
... but only after they cripple it to uselessness.

No BASIC. No loading your own games onto it. 5 obscure games, only one of which I'd even heard of (and I was a C64 kid).

This is a sad let down, considering how cool the original app that got rejected was.
The Norwegian government made a similar site in 2002, because they felt the confusion around the "products" made it easier to hide hidden costs. Because no such service existed, they had to make it themselves.
If determination is so important then are founders who've applied to YC several times given an advantage in future rounds?
Quote from the article:

Which life support machine would you rather be hooked up to?

1. A machine whose software developers always did the simplest thing possible

2. A machine whose software developers went out of their way to anticipate possible problems and planned for each of them

I don't think that is an apt description of what YAGNI is about. I think the choices would be more like:

1. A machine whose software developers always did the simplest thing possible

2. A machine whose software developers went out of their way to abstract the code for possible future expansion, uses a custom rule engine written in a custom domain specific scripting language that is compiled down to XML and finally loaded into an SQL server database cluster with failover support.

To me, that is the kind of over-engineering that YAGNI is all about.
The 1918 flu pandemic was H1N1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
What DrJokepu may have been getting at is that the implementation of rand() itself is not guaranteed. Expecting it not to change in future versions of the library is dubious.
Mturk might be cool. "Here are 3 30 second video clips. At any given time, hover over the one with the clearest view of the subject matter. Here's 5 cents.
I can see a way to build it fairly simply.

The object information is readily accessible when you compile your program with -pg, the memory map is accessible through /proc, it shouldn't be too hard to couple the one to the other and make a nice display. If you are clever about it you might even be able to fish out what memory is filled with what type of data, and colour the map accordingly.

No millions required, unix is pretty clean when it comes to stuff like this.

Some joker had written a shell replacement based on 'doom' where you could literally shoot the processes. You had to hunt them down first of course...
I was working on a project in Fortran. I recommended OCaml, saying that it had all the same capabilities as Fortran (high performance, portability, compiling to native code, support for similar programming style) but also had additional features that would make me more productive. OCaml's position in language design space was perfect for a project in which a functional programmer would be doing most of the work, but a client felt more comfortable with something Fortran-like, in case he ever had to maintain it himself.

If I were making the decision completely on my own, I would prefer Haskell, but in-between languages like OCaml can make good compromise options. I also learned OCaml before Haskell, and consider it to have been a good stepping stone.
Please Make Me Think: Are High-Tech Usability Priorities Backwards?
They said this at the start of the summer in the UK. There was talk of keeping kids from starting school in september because that's when everything would be at its worst. They setup round the clock manned telephone hotlines for advice. Those operators are now sleeping, playing cards, waiting for the phones to ring.

Seems like most people in the UK have had a mild case of swine flu now, and it was pretty boring (I believe myself and my family had mild case of swine flu a month or so ago - we stayed at home, felt a bit rubbish for a few days, then got better).

Is it really worth getting jabs for this? (Unless you're pregnant or have other medical issues). Is it really worth trying to isolate it?

On the grand scale of things, the number of people likely to die from it seems miniscule compared to other threats.

PS (When I started to type "myself" above, my fingers actually typed "mysql"! Hate it when that happens :/ )
Then make srand = mt_srand.
nytimes.com angered me (a fan of nyt) when this was their top story on the front page yesterday.
I disagree. A few were bad, but in my opinion the one by the New York Times designer was a usability improvement, while still keeping things simple. The layout was practically identical.

I think the problem you're experiencing is that craigslist is practically defined by its crappy design. Paradoxically, making craigslist better looking makes it less like craigslist. Every popular website experiences this kind of backlash when it is redesigned, because people get used to it the way it is, and don't want to re-learn what they already know.
This is blogspam. The guy just lifted every photo and juicy quote from Wired and republished it on his blog.
All right, answer me this question.

If there's anything that proves that you're hip and cool and just the smartest thing since Einstein, I'd guess that even more than trashing PHP, it's got to be trashing Comic Sans.

Why does Comic Sans get berated for "being used too often", when nobody says that Times or Arial, for example, are used too often?

Is it trashed for "being ugly"? It can't be "ugly" and "used too often" at the same time, any more than an ugly house can be photographed too often. Also, what does "ugly" mean? Illegible?

Personally, when I'm judging how legible a font is (how easy it is to read when it's small, for example), I have to say that Comic Sans does very well.

Perhaps it's a polarizing design, where some people just hate it, and it's better to bore everybody than to cause that level of heartburn to those of a more sensitive persuasion. Is that it? If so, who are these people, exactly? The general public, I think, really has more important things to worry about than somebodies font choice, so who are these delicate flowers that we're protecting?

I would just be interested in knowing where this animosity is coming from, and whether it's based on anything real, or is it like metro-sexual fashion preference, and it's only based on "what's in"? (Or in this case, "what's out")
Coding it is not difficult. The real problem is how to keep it updated.

Most of the prices are found on very unstructured web pages that are difficult to crawl. You might even get sued if you provide incorrect information. One possible solution is to get the companies to send you updated information themselves, but that's not likely to happen. At least not until you get too popular to ignore.
you've got to be careful with that, though. A long time ago I was writing software to help people sell books. I got mired down in actually selling books, and the software itself never became very good.
There's also a follow-up to the article covering Behringer's notorious IP thefts over the years.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers-track...
Is a "slight mutation" likely? Does this actually really happen? Sounds like more scare mongering in a way :/
Looking at the prices for unlocked iPhones, this doesn't come as a big surprise. The 3GS is especially expensive, at around €800 for the 16GB model, and over €900 for the 32GB one. That's a lot for a phone, most consumers won't consciously spend that much, just hidden in the monthly fees, which have to be in a similar ballpark to other tariffs.

However, I suspect the "old" 8GB 3G model, which is around €500 these days, has been generating a tidy profit for the operators since the release of the 3GS. I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern repeated every year: the new model is the loss leader, the previous model, profitable after having come down in price, feeds off the awareness of the high end one.
indeed. I didn't do the math much past now, and the income curve supports the '30% productivity growth, compounded yearly is unsustainable for 60 years' thesis, even for bill gates.
True, but if you do not have to break stuff then don't.

After all, it was pseudo random to begin with, nobody made any claims as to how random it was, simply that it was 'periodical' and that the period was long enough that in a short lived program you would get the impression of random data.

Every programmer even halfway worth his weight in bits would know that that meant that if you needed 'high grade' random data you'd best look elsewhere, something with a longer period that downsamples to 32 bits for instance, or a hardware based random generator.

This has been true of the 'rand' function on a unix box as well, the period is (2^(sizeof(int) x 8))-1, that's just about the only guarantee you get. (hn eats asterisks)

The article linked here concentrates on the lower single bit of the output of the random generator (the rand(0,1) part of the code will generate a number between 0 and 1), but in fact completely misses the point that if you want a number that is either 0 or 1 you MASK out the lower bit instead of asking PHP to do this using the range option, which is meant to give you a number which has been 'scaled' down from the output of the PRNG in the php core. Right now you are probably sampling the lower bit of a bunch of float operations, not the best way to get one random bit.

(rand() & 1) would have done the job just fine.

So much for programmers that can manipulate bits, even after they see the implementation they still can't figure out how to do it properly. What's so hard about a one bit and ?

So, first of the article uses the PRNG in a completely nonsense way, then it is labelled as 'broken' based on a broken test and next the PHP maintainers get flak for staying backwards compatible when there was no clear need for change.

It wasn't 'broken', it could be improved a lot at the expense of backwards compatibility and so they chose the appropriate route and added a library routine for that.

I'm no big fan of PHP, but this whole thread is way over the top.

here is the same example but with the lower bit masked instead of doing a bunch of unnecessary float ops on the output of the PRNG:

http://ww.com/random.php

I would say that looks quite a bit better than the provided sample.

And I also don't get what the $x=0; is for at the end of the loop on the x-coordinate, never knew that you had to reset your loop variables.
I agree with edmccaffrey: it's not confusing at all! Here's what I'd like from a redesign of Craigslist:

1. Automatic spelling correction from posting-lingo in Standard English.

2. Automatic stemming of arbitrary description of location into zipcode.

3. Avoid scams by something like reputation points.

The front-page navigation is not their killer feature.
Font racism.
Ask HN - Is there a business model in IM bots
Does anyone know if there is a business to be had in building bots, like alicebots, on IM networks, apart from contracting with large companies such yahoo, msn , aol bots, or there branding purposes etc. I'm talking about direct to consumer use. Does advertising or do usage fees work.
"a slight mutation and this could in fact be a seriously dangerous pandemic"

You could say that about almost anything including the common cold, could you not?
The iPhone will never be awesome until anyone can sell an app without approval.
"who cares."

-Hackers
-Musicians
-Apple Fans
-Behringer Customers
-Behringer Haters
-Behringer Competitors
-IP Lawyers
-Copyright Crusaders
and so on.

Lots of Hacker News users are musicians. Lots of musicians are hackers. Lots of them own Behringer gear. Lots of them own Apple gear. Many of them are interested in issues pertaining to Trademark, Copyright, Patents, IP Theft and other legal issues.
1. Ludicrous Speed for fast fingers. Using the following key strokes makes me a search GOD..!

Is Ctrl C, Ctrl T, Ctrl V, Enter really quicker than right-click->"Search the web for [selected word]"?
Honestly, both those fonts are terrible. Granted, nothing can match Verdana's sheer blandness and genericness; but Futura is a very.... lame font for a catalog - far too childish and silly. IMO, it was a good idea to change it, but definitely not to stick Verdana in its place.
"limited apparant innate abilities"

How does that manifest for you? What do you consider those abilities to be?

I think in maths everybody is kind of stupid. Meaning, nobody is really good at maths.
I'm not experiencing any problem. The NY Times design is a disaster. It banishes the useful events feature to the most obscure part of the page, while giving tons of space to a feature that would only be used by the tiniest fraction of the users. Most users don't have an account and will not take advantage of that feature.

I'm not married to the bad design, and I don't think that a better design would inherently decrease usability; but these specific ones do, and the current design is usable. Uglyness doesn't necessarily mean poor usability.
4. Automaticly fix all uppercase posts.
The only useful thing about a C64 emulator, to me, is running arbitrary applications. Luckily, I have an Android phone, so the C64 emulator (JME C64) can run anything I want it to...chiptunes, ahoy!
Rest/ahah · Microformats Wiki
I see only see b2b play here. Making bots to enhance customer support live chat (like on digi-key)
It doesn't even really say that the carriers are loosing money it just says they aren't reaping huge profits from it as some people seemed to expect they would.
It's all over colleges. I went to my school's clinic last Friday, Georgia Tech, and everyone who came in with any flu symptoms had to wear a mask. They had setup a makeshift, H1N1 triage center, separated from the rest of the clinic.

Turns out I had bronchitis(hooray for antibiotics), but it was fairly scary how quickly H1N1 is spreading. It's not too deadly, but seems to be very infectious.
That's not what you want. This is what you want. http://paradroid.ovine.net/index.php
What exactly would people do with multi-line lambdas? I would definitely refactor any lambda with statements or more than one expression in it, give it a name, or use a list comprehension, so I've never seen a problem with them. Can anybody give me an example of a piece of code they think would look better if python had multi-line lambdas?
One thing that seems to have been missed is that the Craigslist design is part of their business model - it results in pages that are very small and keeps their bandwidth costs down, enabling them to offer free listings.
Wait, people actually use that events calendar on Craigslist? I've only seen people mistake it for personals and use it for advertising crap.

I agree that the New York Times designer's version is a big improvement. A few things that really bug me about the current version that are fixed with this design include the left aligned headers / fixed page flow, more obvious search box, and fixed colors. In my opinion if you're going to use default browser link colors you should be using the default browser background color. Maybe that just bothers me though, who knows, I'm weird. Also, why do we need to see a list of countries / states / anything besides local cities? How is that not just more useless clutter?
Thanks for the reference, but I meant someone on this forum. I was hoping someone directly involved in such a decision would share insights. Was there a specific business objective? If so, was it a success? Or was it a more general statement on the company's values?

As hackers with an entrepreneurial mindset, we might face the question of whether or not to open-source some of our work. The question is: when we make that decision, which hat are we wearing?
Having more property-based forms on data-heavy posts (e.g. when selling computers) would be nice. It's very frustrating when someone leaves off something in the plaintext description that would be a required field if it was separated.
http://idsgn.org/images/redesigning-craigslist/craigslist-st...

1. This approach likely pentuples bandwidth, and that's optimistic.

2. If you've never posted to Craigslist, don't try to redesign it. Anyone who's posted with an image knows that no such "product zoom" would be possible because of how CL transforms uploaded images to a suitably small file size.

Craigslist is a paragon of usable design, and you don't want someone who's critical of it for aesthetic reasons to be touching your website.

I got started in this industry as a web designer and I'm considering a move back. There are so many clowns who don't know a thing about usability and think that too much whitespace plus an anorexic serif equals quality.