skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is just silly. The problem with columnists/pundits who argue for investing in xyz "because we're falling behind" particularly where it relates to immature technologies is that governments have a notoriously bad track record at playing/picking favorites that ultimately win out.

Taking this column specifically, what if it turns out that natural gas is far cheaper and far more abundant than solar - at least in the mid and near term? (after you factor in recent shale gas discoveries, it is). Why not instead develop technologies through companies that enable solar like Applied Materials and in the meantime buy subsidized panels from other countries if that's your cup of tea?

I should note that many of us here are also aware and even aim to replace longstanding competitors who are larger, often better capitalized and are certainly more entrenched with technologies that are cheaper, without the legacy overhead costs and are more agile. Why shouldn't this happen in solar/energy?

In solar in particular, look at thin film solar firms like Nanosolar - http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/nanosolar-solar-powe... - yes, one of their robotic plant may be in Germany, but it is a US developed technology that may end up being far cheaper than traditional solar panels. If anything, American firms have shown when the incentive exists, they can play catch up and they can do it quickly and generally better as US dominance across an array of industries shows (disclosure: I'm a Canadian).

This, incidentally is what can happen when the subsidies go away: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125193815050081615.html
First subpixel typeface, ever
NC allows good quick hacks but beware that it could open security issues as well. e.g. never do "nc -l -p 1234 -e /bin/bash" beyond your local machines.
That depends strongly on the amount of time it takes for getting fit, doesn't it? In my experience in Basic for the Army, even very high levels of exercise do not prevent one from putting on fat ("Oh, just eat as much as you want; they'll work it off you!", I was told. I believed them. I shouldn't have).
I forgot a couple other points.

A noninfected can see a zombie and recognize that it is the zombified version of some "known" agent.

There's two goals with the communication:

- the first is that it opens up a lot of fun if you have pluggable behavior for noninfected (EG: LIARS!)

- the second is that it forces you to deal with interval arithmetic (or an equivalent scheme)
Adobe has always wanted to be more than just "the Photoshop People" - which is good considering how Corel, Fractal design, MetaCreations, and eventually Macromedia fared. Selling paintbrushes is a hard business.
That conclusion really doesn't follow from the stated proposition. The proposition is that doing sprints will make you smarter than you are now, not that it will make you smarter than someone else who doesn't do them. The only conclusion about Usain Bolt that you can reach from the stated proposition is that he's now smarter than he was before he started sprinting. </pedantry>
"I have used this book. It's a good introduction but uses a rather non-nix sysAPI"*

I think the only reason this would be a down-side would be if you were trying to implement a unix-like operating system (not that there's anything wrong with that).

It would do up-and-coming designers good to avoid Unix only because it's becoming sort of a "standard" way of architecting an OS and studying only unix-like systems can have an effect on creativity, innovation, etc.

I love BeOS/Haiku but even it is a bit too "unixy" for my taste.

I definitely agree with the previous post that going back to CS texts is the way to go, and it would be instructive to look at the operating systems once used by mainframes in the past as this is where allot of the "contemporary" technology we use today came from.

Ultimately the goals you have for the system you are designing should drive your architecture but I think a rich diet of various different operating systems is a good way to prepare for the journey.
I have a pretty good sense about how I feel about pretending to be someone's friend for 6 months so I can gain access to their house and subsequently steal everything they own. Playing out that scenario was useful to me. But I wouldn't want my [hypothetical] kid to make a friend with the eventual intent of stealing their toys and never talking to them again.

There are a huge variety of moral questions. If there's a safe real-world parallel, I agree that's probably a better lesson, but games can probably be designed to help fill in a bunch of gaps.
http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
Netboot.me - boot any OS over the net
Try `Diplomacy' if you have enough time and people.
"We examined a large sample of successful technology companies..."

Please note the flawed approach which makes all their conclusions meaningless.
Only more intelligent than he would be if he didn't run sprints, to be fair. That's going to be hard to show after the fact.
Suggestions for my 2 iphone developer questions
My developer account runs out in 20 days. I never used my help questions. Suggestions for what I should ask?
Well, the topic in #python includes "It's too early to use Python 3.x".
You're right, I think I'll put that in.
Eh, I at least understand getting a BS in computer science degree if it's in the engineering school. As an engineer I'm required to take a very math and science heavy course load and all the various engineering core curricula. In addition, I can see computer science as being categorized as science for historical reasons, but if it's not science it is at least applied mathematics. Given that applied math is an engineering degree, I see no reason why computer science shouldn't be.

In contrast, not only does political science have nothing to do with science, but the course requirements aren't even science related. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll take one basics statistics course. However, I have yet to see a polisci course that requires differential equations.
I didn't experience pain either... until I used git for a while. Then I realized all the pain that I was suffering but wasn't aware of.

> The amount of time people spend blogging about how great git is could be surely put to better use.

Maybe they're spending so much time blogging because git really is that good?
The article is indeed for people who are pretty satisfied with svn. I don't think of the article as a waste of time because there are many people who don't know what are the advantages of git over svn.
rant warning
I may get voted down simply for using loaded phrases, but stepping around them would be laborious. the largest labor unions in the US (Teachers, AMA, etc) operate off a marxist labor theory. this is completely fucking ridiculous considering the average education level of these organization's members. how long is it going to take basic econ to sink into the general knowledge base of humanity? the world seems completely mired in mid 19th century economic thought. If we can't at least get to the level of understanding marginal utility it is going to kill us. More modern economic theories are paid lip service to in the form of being implemented whenever doing so is politically expedient. This is the polar opposite of the spirit of econ. An economist by definition looks past the consequences that are of immediate concern to the public/political body.

OTOH: massive tech improvements causing changes to society will probably hit before we WWIII ourselves with our economic ignorance so all the angst may be for nothing. that is if economic ignorance doesn't (continue to) severely hamper technological improvements to the point that we fall short of saving ourselves from ourselves.
This was the standard method of "copywriting" Maps - put in an artificial or geological feature that isn't there. You know who's been stealing your data then - The "There be Dragons" hack
I'm not very interested in taking it seriously, I was thinking about "How do I use undocumented APIs?" or "How do I jailbreak my phone?"
The teaching of critical thinking is not the only value we have. As a society we value having well-rounded children. Personally at a minimum I would like the education system to teach all of the following to students: enough history to understand the broad scope of civilization, the political system and recent history of their region and country, geography, their primary language, the basics of a secondary language, basic first aid, math and science. Note that this is a minimum, and I hope that students learn more than this.

This leaves a lot of latitude. Within each area you have choices to make. But no matter what you're going to be teaching kids about a lot of things that they don't necessarily have an interest in.
Very interesting, and big news.

As well as being the first extra-solar rocky planet discovered, it's also the largest rock we know about, beating out the previous record holder (Earth) by a factor of five.

We've known about a bunch of these super-Earths (1-10 Earth masses) for some time, but there's been some disagreement over whether they were large rocks or small Neptunes. Now we know that large rocky bodies are at least possible, this tells us something interesting about planetary formation.
I am particularly amused by this guy's ranting about hygiene and macros. I have written quite a bit of lisp, and debugged plenty of macros, and once you have some experience with gensyms you really don't look back and wish there was a hygienic system.
I'd be willing to bet that if the mods took the time to find out who downmodded you, then they would have a few extra folks worth banning :)
This is one comprehensive description you gave here. But the problem is, it looks like a simulation that will be more enjoyable to the programmer than to the person watching it. After all, it would just look like dots moving around changing color.

Additionally, I'm looking for something that besides being cool, will be sort of useful.
What else do economists disagree about?
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I meant the 19th century economic revolution, not the blog :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

the longer your responses get the more I agree with you, so I don't think we have different priors, just a miscommunication somewhere.
How can you not be aware of pain? If I was wasting time on a laborious task, I think I'd know about it and think of a better way. Care to share an example from your experience?

During my average day, I probably spend a few minutes total messing with svn. For my usecase, it's already optimum. The only way I could reduce that time is to not put in any commit messages :/
My Developer account runs out in 20 days; are there any tools to help convert my code to Android compatibility?

:)
Proper closures in a pure language are immutable, too.
I don't understand why Friedman would prefer to produce solar panels in America than ship them from China. Trading between nations makes sense for the same reason trading between individuals makes sense: specialization is efficient, leading everyone to greater wealth.

He mentions that China will have a great export platform in renewable energy technology as the world adds 2.5 billion more people. So he's anticipating future demand. It seems to me that that is useful information for entrepreneurs, but it's nothing that demands government action. If entrepreneurs decide it would be profitable to supply that impending demand, then they will. If the government has to subsidize to make that happen, then maybe it shouldn't happen.

Just because there will be future demand for something doesn't mean we need government action to supply it. I'm sure those billions of people will want pants and meat and toothbrushes too, but there's no particular reason why America has to be the place to produce those. Just let people produce whatever they decide is most profitable for them to produce, and we're likely to get a more efficient outcome than one decided by central planning.

I think solar energy is great. If we want it, all we have to do is worry about the demand side, not the supply side. That is, consumers and governments should buy the best, cheapest solar panels available. I don't think it matters where the production, or the R&D, happens.

He suggests that trading solar panels with China might be similar to trading oil with Saudi Arabia. I don't understand why. Trading with Saudi Arabia is considered a problem because the money is thought to fuel terrorism. China doesn't have the nicest foreign policy on the planet, but I'd love to make them more rich, not less, because they seem to be becoming more peaceful as they grow richer. And if China ever starts funding terrorism, it is much easier to set up new solar panel factories than it is to set up new oil fields.
In interest of a full comparison does anyone have a link to an article discussing the reverse topic of why subversion is better than git? Does such an article even exist or is git that much better than subversion?
Insiders sell like there's no tomorrow
QueryPath - PHP library for manipulating XML and HTML
Somebody else commented a week ago saying that they thought it would be brilliant for Facebook to lease their ads the way Google does adsense. I know that I've clicked more Facebook ads than I've clicked any other advertisements I've seen.
I've been using a little PHP hack for this for about a year and a half : http://ethanmiller.name/notes/php_quicklinks/

Easier setup if you use shared hosting...
SVN has HTTP auth. no SSH key BS. Until Git has this you can forget about adoption for most corporate dev.
> extra vital features (like improvement of inline functions (lambda))

I would not consider this a vital feature. You can already nest arbitrary functions, you just have to name them. However Tail-Call-Optimization would be a vital feature. (Alas, it's not going to happen.)
Being fat doesn't mean you aren't fit.

I've been thin my whole life, but am working to get fit now after a year or two of largely sedentary existence and it is making a big difference for me.
It might not be the first, and it might not be terribly useful, but it is interesting.
No surprises here, anything that reduces supply increases price (of a teacher) is lobbied for by the powerful teachers unions.
the $25 burger signals that your restaurant is capable of making a burger worth $25 to someone. this then reflects well on the care you take with your cheaper offerings. of course in reality the relative qualities of product offerings can be completely unrelated, but our monkey brains are not objective. thinking that nerds are free of bias is a bias :)
Facebook as Nonfad
$12/mo Xen slice from prgrmr for web & source

$200ish a month from Amazon for hosting for some consulting work (although I don't pay for it)

$0 for a few apps on App Engine
Ask HN: License fee for BDB (Berkeley Database)
Does anyone know how much Oracle charges for using BDB (Berkeley Database) in a dual-licensed open-source+commercial application?

While Tokyo Cabinet (http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet) provides a similar key-value DB like BDB, it lacks some features like replication, custom recovery logs and checkpointing which BDB has. Oracle on its part has made it very difficult to determine BDB licensing (we have to go through a sales rep and it is taking way too long).
US Government recommends weighing laptop before and after each visit to China
Actual article:

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/09/15/warren-buffett-co...
Yup, agreed. Creating and endorsing good documentation is an artform in itself.

Currently the barrier of entry is too high and I guess too few people are deep enough in twisted to explain all the why's of even a simple baseline example properly.

It's kind of a deadlock situation because without that lowlevel insight it's also hard to get confident enough to contribute high-level docs.
It wouldn't be that surprising.

You put together custom regex-processing silicon (eg: what Tarari used to make) and related hardware (eg: entropy calculators, that kind of thing) and mix in various types of content-addressed memory and you could get some nutty performance #s on specialized tasks like what's discussed there.
Not until there's an SCC provider for integration with Visual Studio. You're not going to get many of the coders in my company using the command line (or third party software) to check code in/out.
How about this one: 2.x is dead. While bug fixes and minor changes are occuring, it's going to slip into maintenance mode once 2.7 comes out. All the cool things, such as importlib and other items are py3k only.
Compared to other MMORPGs, UO did not protect you as much. So other players could trap you and kill you, and then rob your stuff. In modern MMORPGs usually even if Player Killing is allowed, they still don't get your stuff.

Learning, well, for example not to be so trusting and to take care of myself :-) I fell in a similar trap once: I was already quite low on hit points, but some guy convinced me to still fight some monster, as he would be by my side. Of course then he robbed me. Not sure if I really learned, but the lesson is clear - if you are wounded, take care of yourself.

Even though it was just a game, I can tell you that such experiences would sting in UO :-)
Sfxr for haXe
RMI for python
Here's one take, though it's not wildly convincing:

http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/7437/W...

My job in the past was to evaluate source control systems for different organizations and what made the most sense. While I think Git and Mercurial are great for open source pieces, I'd pretty much never recommend Git inside of a large organization just yet. Perhaps never given how much visibility and control most companies want on their internal development flow. Checking in code to local repositories on any large scale isn't something most companies are big fans of.

Overall, Perforce is probably my most recommended for companies, though it has its downsides. Subversion with their improvements to branching should be getting more props these days, though. ClearCase is preferred by a lot of process-focused software companies (government contractors, etc).

What I think traditional centralized systems need is a better story for local repos or at least private branches. It needs to feel natural and built-in so that smaller pieces of work can be handled quickly without necessarily shipping them to team branches (or main). It's all doable now but the emphasis and infrastructure should encourage incremental changes in isolation which Git and Mercurial do a great job of. This feature isn't one major organizations need as an essential, but developers sure know the importance of it.
Having hacked a (poorly implemented, bug riddled) macro system into Ruby because I needed it, I can say with certainty that Ruby is not an acceptable Lisp. It just turns out that some of the (easiest) things you can use macros for can be faked with a combination of closures and fully executable class code (both good ideas, both present in Ruby and in Python). Try to do any of the most interesting/great things with macros and you'll run into a brick wall.

Of course this can be overcome - he mentions two projects which could turn Ruby from most of a Lisp into 100% of a Lisp with direct access to the parse tree. But those are not used right now in every day Ruby programming.
Dude, the original comment and the point of the thread was price per performance. You are technically correct but missing the point in saying that the Veyron is a "performance" car, and I stand by my statement that it is 6% performance and 94% flash and exclusivity.

Your comments regarding P/W and comparison of an F-22 to a rocket are illogical. A rocket is not a fighter jet, but an GTR720 is an automobile, one which in every way out performs a Veyron at 1/14 the price.

If you feel the need to make sure that the Veyron is labeled as a "performance" car, continue to repeat yourself. You will be missing the forest for the trees, because no one purchases this car based on performance.
I've never seen such an article and in my own personal opinion, I don't see how such an argument could be made. I'm not a fan of Git in particular, but I love the "distributed" in DVCS. I use BZR on a daily basis and have never once found anything I missed from the days all of our projects were in SVN. You can use most of the DVCS tools just like SVN if you want (checkout, update, checkin), or go all out distributed with branches, merges, pushes, pulls, etc.

I guess SVN gives you real Trac support. :-) There are Git, BZR, etc plugins for Trac, but they all feel very hacked in and incomplete to me. I love BZR because it gets you launchpad.net (and it's got some stellar Py-bindings). I know Git has github, but I don't care for it either as a real project management suite.

EDIT:
(Note: My opinions are from an open source developer perspective.)
Funny this ends up here. I was asking earlier on twitter today about whether there was a C# convention for naming private variables.

Seems that it is indeed _variablename , while I don't know if I like it, it would seem that it is more common then I thought and specifically mentioned in this article.
To borrow a concept from programming languages, svn is blub.
I had the chance to attend the conference. The talks were great and I'm excited about the next release!

I also got my book signed by John, so that was very cool (and John is awesome!)
Being fat does mean you aren't fit. Being thin is necessary but not sufficient for physical fitness.
Eh I can tell you that variations on the above scenario are actually useful.

There's a handful of companies that essentially do more in-depth versions of these things at like the level of "h1n1 comes to small town america; what emergent behavior patterns do we see in our model" (names escaping me sorry).

There's also a lot of boring-ish economics sims that've been done (names escaping me also, sorry).

To make it fun for the end-user you'd have to "borrow" tilesets from a videogame I think.

You're right though: it's more fun for the person making it than a casual observer.
Facebook is profitable.
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http://www.simplisticcomplexity.com/2008/03/05/cleanly-migra...
This again is anecodotal, but my wife is in the process of working on her master's thesis in history. She went for the master's for personal development reasons, but now that she is close to getting it she started looking at what she wanted to do to pay off the student loans and thought of teaching.

Once she finishes she will meet the requirements to apply as a full instructor at the multiple community colleges within commuting distance, and as and adjunct professor/instructor at both the local 4 year college and the university she is about to graduate from. To teach at the public high schools though, she will need to go back and complete classes in education the equivalent of another full-time year in college.
List of Unix utilities
I just searched the Chrome blog for "webkit" and here's the results:

http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=...

In general I think Google is very good about promoting Open Source awareness, my post was my attempt at humour :D.
That's about as good an argument as saying only communists use svn.

So basically your argument is that the only people who can have a valid opinion about the usefulness of different rcs's are those using git :/
From MySQL to jQuery, via PHP, XML & Ajax
> if you are a good cook, a sharp knife will be very useful. Others might only hurt themselves with it.

Therefore inexperienced cooks should prepare food with butter knives?