skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i find this interesting. this looks like a good site that could be useful. if i was called by someone trying to sell me something and they sent me their link to this website i could size them up. it would draw me in. further, if i was in the market for a lawyer or something and i went to this site i could see them and select one to call. i am currently in the need of selling a condo, so i would love it if there were some real estate agents on this site (i know it's new so probably not built up enough yet) so i could pick out a hot chica to help me move the condo quickly.
> No, please stop cherry-picking my statements. I made a sentence consisting of two parts. Leaving out a key part is dishonest.

No, I split the sentence in two and showed one of the two parts is wrong. You should have left it out.

You essentially made an ad hominem argument, and I pointed it out.

I do understand the point that when you can not verify the argument, you verify the person.

Which is what you did, but you did it wrong. You compared his beliefs to yours, and since they didn't match you don't trust him.

You can verify the person if you want, but not by comparing his opinions to yours.
I'll differ from berntb - you should learn Perl exactly because it's fairly similar to those languages you already know, and the effort required to do so will be minimal.

You may not end up using it all that frequently, but an hour or two seeing how another programming language does something is usually interesting perspective, imo.
Even worse, some companies prohibit alcohol consumprion over lunch even if you're not in the office.
If you know python and ruby, learn something that I will actually improve/change your programming: Scheme, ML, Prolog, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Haskell, Mozart/Oz, or Forth.

Python and Ruby are not that different, and neither is that different from Perl.
We usually only have a Friday Fun half-day - a full 8 hours of movie-watching, beer-drinking times is probably a bit much. Work in the morning, have lunch, wrap up your work and unwind until hometime. It works pretty well.

As other poster mentioned, the presence of beer is what makes this tick - and adds an important layer of non-corporate-ness which is crucial to this sort of thing. If it feels like an HR-approved activity, nobody will have fun.

Also, the lack of any senior management is what really makes this tick. For us it's just the engineers, bizdev guys, and a couple managers we work with daily. No big bosses present.
It is okay for the government to do that, yes, because they're spending it on stuff that everyone needs in order to have a functional society that allows you to consider making money in the first place.
I would kill for GMail to add vim-like text editing.
OpenID: Now more powerful and easier to use
Why users dumped your your itworld.com website for better news sources:

* Microscopic text

* Content squeezed in between walls of Ads

* Content split over 5 pages to serve more ads

* Average content-quality is so low (zero substance linkbait)
that you could just as well serve headline + Lorem Ipsum along
with your ads.
My memory is fading so I'm not sure Mirai brought SubD first... did it? I was in Final Fantasy 7 project where we used Nichimen almost exclusively for real-time models, which was 1995-1997. Then I went into Final Fantasy the Movie project which adopted Maya (beta back then). We started off with nurbs but soon decided to shift to poly model, which was sometime in 1998, iirc. I don't quite remember we jumped right to SubD or we used layered shapedrive (low-poly cage morphs high-poly model) first.

I do remember I cursed a lot about Maya's scripting interface and C++ API, and wished to go back to the old days I could invoke REPL in Nichimen and hack almost everything in it. I ended up making a Maya plugin that allows Scheme to be scripting interface instead of MEL, and after that I used Scheme almost exclusively scripting Maya, but it wasn't as close as the feel in Nichimen where you could open the hood and mess around its guts.
glaciers retreating is no uncertainty. it is happening, no doubt about it. now move your ass and come see it.
I'm always skeptical of people that weave good arguments without clearly stating their point of view.
well, let me guess. you're no scientist in the first place?
Cities at night from space (taken from ISS)
20-year user of vi here... yes, once you get used to vi, going back to an editor for humans is hard.
The standard is to vest everyone over 4 years, with a 1 year cliff.

Omitting the cliff is a highly accurate predictor of problems.
Transporting a 510 Ton Steam Generator
There's plenty of evidence, other than temperature measurements: permafrost, glaciers, and polar ice melting; extended growing seasons; changes in bird migration.
I find it amusing that he asserts "blockwise selection mode. Extremely powerful and available in very few other editors".

Blockwise selection mode is available in almost every Windows editor I use - from the Delphi IDE, Visual Studio, even to Notepad2, Shift+Alt does block selection, or alternatively Alt + mouse selection.
Please upvote to give the standards more exposure.

Yahoo, Google and MySpace are supporting the spanking new OpenID OAuth Extension protocol. I have this on my plate at this exact moment, I am not sure how long it will take them to support this, but for now, I found Yahoo's Contacts API to be the easiest, and Facebook's Registration/SSO to be the hardest.

This is what my todo list looks like:

1) Visit all these websites:
http://knowem.com/

2) See which ones have authentication API

3) Implement them.

4) ???
No worries :-)

I tried to reach you on freenode but I guess you were away.
I have been making a similar case at the municipal level:

http://raisethehammer.org/article/893

I feel the author's pain regarding PDFs.
The conclusion that MAN-MADE global warming is real is plain bullshit. What has been replicated is leftist hysteria.
What do you mean? In what way is it false?
Let's take a step back here. Joel's blog entry was about ONE chapter in Codes at Work. If the anti-duct bloggers were to read the entire book, they would see that TDD, C++, templates, pattern fever, OO oration, IDEs--don't get much credibility with the whole lot of them.

But there are self-interest forces at work in arguing against the duct-tape arguments--advocates of patterns, tdd and so on.

Two parties in this argument here have shipped real software in crunch mode. Perhaps others in this argument have not.
hahaha, I can handle being misguided if I get to release two successful business ventures in my life.

In any case, I'm not arguing with you on the popularity of the two for sure, but I am happy MS is deciding to get their act together and really try to compete, however slow and small their steps are.

Edit: Okay you got me curious, why was this down modded? Was it outside the scope of the conversation? Or was it the comment about Spolsky and Attwood?
Why I got kicked out of Seedcamp 2009
Scientific data is beginning to be shared these days, at least in some fields.
Unless you have a virtual monopoly, I fail to see how you can be successful if you suck? Why would anyone use your product at all?
s/"all the way down"/"all around"/ and I didn't say "turtles" anywhere.

"Chew it", that's my most well-behaved curse word. It's the second person imperative version of "darn-it!" and "blimey!"
DataSF App Showcase
Are manufacturers of granite countertops going out of business because of that?
RateMySite: [coffee][talk] (San Francisco only right now)
Great idea, and I wish them well, but how will it be sustainable? I believe there have been a few other experiments with news orgs owned by or operated as nonprofits (The St. Petersburg Times springs to mind) yet even they've had to lay off people.

Then you have the NPR/PBS models, nonprofits that use donations, grants, and "underwriting" to support free content operations, but they can be sustained because they are basically monopolies or oligopolies when shows are broadcast in local markets.
Apple just hit the sweet spot of convergence. Nearly everyone wanted to carry around a cell phone and a music player and so mating them together is a big thing. However, they also made it a mobile computer and internet device along with those things. And it's the same single device that you would "have" to carry around anyway - the cell phone - and have a lot of nice extras thrown in that you might not carry a dedicated device for.

And as Nintendo showed with their Wii, there's a huge market for games outside of the core gamer crowd. People who want something fun, cheap, and accessible. And the App Store provides that - a couple dollars becomes an impulse purchase while $30 is something you have to think about.

The problem with other handhelds is that they do one thing - games. Apple's handheld gaming machine also serves an essential function - phone - but also provides gaming. I, as a consumer, don't want to have to remember and carry a lot of devices. And the iPhone means that I can carry a little game machine, phone, media player, internet device all in one. And that gives me a lot of engagement in the platform in the way that sometimes remembering a non-essential device doesn't.
Awesome... looks like some nice modifications there. thanks.
For human-readable document content, there's nothing wrong with plain old HTML, though formats like RST or markdown are somewhat easier to produce. (I save my blog documents in markdown format - they're just easier to write and update, and I don't have to futz around with JS-heavy WYSIWYG editors.)

However, these aren't adequate for structured data that falls outside the scope of a generic print document. For that, I would recommend YAML or JSON over XML, not only because they're human-readable but also because they're far less verbose.
I started this as an interesting way to get people communicating with each other - I'm fairly new to San Francisco, and am always interested in meeting new people to chat with, so I decided to make a site where you can post online that "i'm sitting at a coffee shop, and interested in chatting with anyone around" - then other people can go online and see which coffee shops have people at them - kind of a longwinded explanation for a simple site...I'm hoping the concept makes sense with the minimalist approach on the page.
Still need to make a mobile version, I know the JS doesn't play nice with the BBerry, not sure about iPhones - anyone out there that can try for an iPhone?
well, sort of. the way this particular type of 'backgrounding' was reported to work, at&t would be keeping track of the user's position, not apple or the iphone itself. it sounded to me like it won't require any changes to the iphone os for this.
Metrics for social games
I just don't see, with current hardware, the iPhone taking over the niche that the xbox360/ps3 serve for more serious gamers.

The serious types also seem like they'd be spending a lot more money, but I guess there are more casual gamers with $20 and an iPhone in terms of sheer wallets.
Contrast Brands in Public's PR angle with Doc Searls's Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management).

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page
New U.S. Federal Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
It is true that while every violation of civil law comes before the court as a civil action, but is it true that the existence of a civil action implies that no crime was committed?

Your mention of murder down-thread is an excellent example, as someone can commit an act of murder and face a criminal murder trial and/or a civil "wrongful death" case. O.J. Simpson is a famous, high-profile example of this.

You are basically taking the same position that his P.R. people might: that since he was acquitted in the criminal case, he is not a criminal - even though he lost the civil case. Yes, in the "innocent until proven guilty" sense of the word "criminal", you and they have an excellent technical point.

But you and they would have us to believe that O.J. actually committed no crime, and that might work on anyone who does not reserve the right to draw a distinction between having committed a crime and having been convicted of it.

Back to Microsoft, ask yourself what the Sherman Act is: is it civil law or criminal law? As it happens, the Sherman Act includes both criminal and civil remedies for violations. That is why, for example, books like this exist...

http://www.amazon.com/Criminal-Antitrust-Litigation-Handbook...

The DoJ pressed the matter as a civil action. This doesn't mean that Microsoft's violations were merely civil violations. Rather, it means that the civil violations were the ones that were successfully prosecuted. Whether or not their violations were also criminal in nature is a question that was never pursued.

So, yeah, Microsoft's actions were non-criminal an an O.J. kind of way. I'll give you that.
I'm actually really surprised that Loopt isn't more open with it's data, or doesn't utilize their website more.
> You can verify the person if you want, but not by comparing his opinions to yours.

Which isn't what I did. At no point have I given my opinion. My opinion has not changed between my two posts, nor has my point. The last post was an elaboration of the first. If you find no issue with the second, then there is none with the first (other than too brief, apparently).

I do not trust the author of an anti-climate change article because he has a pre-existing opinion against climate change AND doesn't cite any sources. If either would have been the opposite, I would have had a different opinion, because then there would be no motive to fudge the truth. Both parts of the statement are important and relevant.
Like they say on LWN.net, this might just be an incentive to develop free alternatives to Google's apps. The problem is not Android itself, but the stuff they add on top of it; maps, gmail, etc...
Is there some kind of a book you recommend for the business ignorant on these matters?
Pandora adds music videos, circumvents labels
I'm sure you're all getting sick of me posting this link, but this is relevant:

http://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby/tree/master

It's the same idea but it uses the Objective-J runtime which is similar to Ruby's runtime.
Have you heard of the "It's All Text" Firefox extension? It copies the content of any textarea to a tempfile and opens it up in an external editor of your choice. Writes to the tempfile are copied back to the textarea. It's not quite in-browser vim, but it's pretty close. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125
Let's Kill The CPM (Advertising Model)
I'm definitely fine with using data formats for things that really are just raw data (e.g. a series of records with specific fields), and I like JSON too.

I just hope that they don't try to chop up something that should be "just a document" into a pile of ugly marked-up containers that make it very hard to see what's even in the document anymore.
"Two parties in this argument here have shipped real software in crunch mode. Perhaps others in this argument have not."

This is a key point. Agile methodology vendors who wax loudest about TDD and other "core practices" have never shipped any significant software [1]. None of them ever built a software product or a startup. Neither do they show us any decent body of code written with their superior approach [2] (vs talk interminable about how our code will be better if we adopt their advice and pay them the big consulting $$).

After all the book is about Coders At Work, not "Methodology Vendors at Work" (which might be an interesting book, in a very horrific fashion).

[1] How many of the creators of the Agile Manifesto have shipped any significant software or built a software company? Most (All?) of them are methodology consultants.

[2] Kent beck has JUnit. Robert Martin has Finesse. The rest of the agile gurus don't have anything. I leave it to the readers to decide if JUnit and Finesse are significantly superior, designwise, to other Open Source code bases, written without TDD.
Indeed, Any solution that assumes the wrong cause may cause just as much harm as it does good. For all we really know the trend could suddenly halt or accelerate despite our attempts to "control" it. When political goals drive the debate then true discourse gets drowned out and progress may either stop or continue in the wrong direction.
That's a neat idea. How do you change it to show tab number in the tab header?
I'm not sure I would emulate it, I just said it was neat. :) However, it does use a very nice principle: that large spaces are easy to click, so it's very easy to move between sections using the mouse.
Or just use Red? http://wiki.github.com/jessesielaff/red
I like the concept a lot, I'm not so sure on the small and dotted border. I think the small text could possibly work without the border though, for some reason it just distracts me.

Really cool concept though.
I agree, but apparently that bank doesn't.
But this, to me, is why Google Voice would have been so nice. :) It is a general-purpose machine, that should be capable of running "any" application, including any number of competing phone implementations.
Maybe the idea is to get users hooked on the powerful features first, so they will then decide to tackle the command interface to increase speed.
You're better off doing it the old fashioned way: study and practice.
Look you aren't "genuinely curious" you are being a total wanker.

Wiktionary definition: "A specific act committed in violation of the law."
Wikipedia (the sentence before you earlier nitpick quote): "Crime is the breach of one or more rules or laws for which some governing authority, via mechanisms such as police power, may ultimately prescribe a conviction."
Wordnet: " an act punishable by law; usually considered an evil act" and "an evil act not necessarily punishable by law"

N.B. The definitions from Wordnet, my uses passes BOTH. So it seems that if a governing body passes a law or regulation against a certain activity and then the government (through whatever process) finds someone in violation and sanctions them, you don't want to call it a crime (despite this being well within the broadest definitions), you want to have a big cry. Well sorry buddy, this isn't a court of law, this is the English language. You are the reason people hate lawyers.
This brings up the interesting question of "how is this different from denying evolution"? The relevant question is, I think: if the theory turns out to be wrong, how hard is it to explain the data?

If the theory of evolution turns out to be wrong, there's a huge stack of data which we're going to have a very hard time explaining sensibly, including DNA evidence, observations of short-term evolution in certain living things, and the entire goddamn fossil record. Apart from "God put it all there deliberately to test us" there's no way to come up with an alternative explanation.

If the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions have a significant effect on the climate turns out to be wrong, then... well, the only actual data we need to come up with an alternative explanation for is a hundred-year modest overall warming trend (for which we can all easily think up a few alternative explanations). Everything else is just theoretical predictions.
Even if I realize I have someone in the same coffee shop who's looking to talk to strangers, how do I recognize them short of hollering?
No, actually, I think he's brilliant at it. I tend to at best half agree with him on software issues, but I enjoy how lively his writing is and the way he uses it to promote his company is usually fine with me. In some ways it's exemplary, because the promotion is typically secondary to what he's writing about, and tends to be related to the subject at hand, so it doesn't come across as arbitrary or sneaky. I suppose a lesser writer might have trouble pulling it off, but it's a good model for software people.

Still, it was nice to see him get excited about something not directly in that vein.

Edit: It was also by reading a Spolsky post way back when that I originally discovered PG's essays. So I can't ever get too mad at him.
The Many Facets of Natural Computing
Try the "it's all text!" Firefox extension.
Where US Oil comes from (Infographic)
Just a note that this is three years old and somewhat outdated, but... it's still a pretty cool trick/idea, similar to the Ruby->PHP compiler mentioned here recently: http://www.ruby-php.org/

I'm not sure, though, that it's useful enough to "break through." judofyr mentioned Red ( http://github.com/jessesielaff/red ) as a more production ready Ruby-JavaScript tool but even that hasn't been updated in a year it seems :-(
Profession doesn't determine personality
Haha, you have a valid point - slightly easier than a kid yelling "DAD, WHERE ARE YOU?" in a store...
I was thinking about that, and thought about adding an "advanced options" tab that will open up a few additional items, like:
what color shirt are you wearing?
different time limit (preset @ 30min right now)
etc.,

The problem is trying to keep it very minimalist and simple though while throwing all those options in the loop
LSD. And the creativity is not at all logical, it's more of an emotional/emphatic "now I understand what life is all about" sort of a thing. I wrote nearly 50 pages of reflection on LSD and I couldn't read any of it when it wore off; it was somewhat legible but highly emotional writing. Rereading it several times evoked the same feelings of satisfaction and being content with myself, but other than that, it's not something I would recommend for hacking code. But go for it if you want rambling sensationalism.

This is wrt to mental enhancements. The trip itself was completely insane. Hallucination is fun for a bit, but mine was laced and I was hallucinating for about 4 hours. Something I will always remember was walking on a black and white checkered tile, like a chessboard. All the tiles jumped up at me like boxes of various heights, and I was bouncing from one to the other to cross a puddle of green algae filled water. In reality, this was a highly kept shopping mall with glossy marble floors.

Also, changes in color and patterns produced sounds in my chest that were at times very pleasant and other times nightmarish.

It's hard to get rid of an experience like that. The metaphors and descriptions you acquire will affect your language to some degree. The first year after the trip I was a big fan and recommended LSD to everyone, but now, meh, I just couldn't be bothered. It takes a while to get out of your system completely; I was emotional for weeks afterwards.
Actually, I find that Emacs has a steeper learning curve than Vi/Vim. I had an easier time learning to switch between command/insert modes than to try and get comfortable with all of the Meta-/Control- sequences in Emacs.

{edit} not to start a flame war.. to each their own {/edit}
Scientists see numbers inside people’s heads
Get Rid of Belly Fat Quickly
This is for GVIM.

set guitablabel=(%N%M)\ %f
Nice collection of themes for Gnome and Ubuntu-September2009-
Right, but deflation rewards the savers. By creating inflation in essence you are putting a gun to the heads of savers and saying spend now or lose value.
I once wrote ":tabnew something.js" in my IM window and sent it before I realized that the wrong window had focus. The person replied with, "bash: :tabnew: command not found." I told him, "I was hoping you were vim, actually".
Lots of data sets