skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To carry on your analogy, I believe the original question was more similar to: I have farmland that's currently completely saturated with a variety of bountiful crops, but every day I'm finding these new seeds that seem like they would make for even better crops, and that seem like genuinely fun things to plant. However, as excited as I am about planting them, I don't have the resources—my farmland is full. How do I store the seeds in a way that will persist the level of excitement I had about them, so that when I reap one of my crops, I can pick the next idea to follow from my piles of packets?
Hmm, for a second I though this was a follow-up on tornado vs twisted rant. And now the twisted side...
clickable link http://www.thump.in
Twisted, Tornado, the Zero-Step, and Activation Energy
Thanks! Me too.
" But people who choose closed source projects tend to do so for their own set of reasons (mostly support and the fact that they don't have the time and/or skill to look through a languages source code to figure out a bug themselves)"

A bit of background: I'm a bit of an odd duck. I'm a vim using rubyist on ubuntu (with awesome wm) OSS during the day and at night I program in C# on a mac using mono and monodevelop. To me, C# is a much better designed Java (the good parts.) I've found the Mono project to be very reliable as well, and they are doing really cool stuff like aot compilation and running on ARM. Anyway...

To me, F# is interesting because I already program in C# in the same way that clojure is interesting to java developers.
"Find out what other people are saying about...your favorite brands."

This sounds like a great resource for ad people, but I simply cannot see myself ever gushing about the new Nike commercial.

Sadly, there is probably a userbase for this--I just hope to never meet a Thump.in user in the wild.
I submitted a patch to Twisted to fix their SOCKS implementation.

It was "accepted" after a month, and by accepted it means put into a branch where it will take up to a year to be incorporated into the mainline depending on whether the few maintainers feel like taking a look at it.
Right now, I'm using the "Someday" slot in Things to represent concepts, ideas, and other things that don't have an immediate "plan" attached. It works well enough for storage and search, but that "assembling together" process has brought up another idea for something that would work better: basically, a program that shows you all your ideas as little fridge-magnets, allows you to move them around and draw relationships between them, and group them together under "named entities" (e.g. for a novel, character traits could be moved around and grouped to form characters.)
Retaining browser scrollTop between page refreshes
Ben Tilly: Effective A/B Testing
Passionate software developers need to accept the fact that web programming has hit the mainstream. There are tons of amateurs doing it, and the number is growing explosively thanks to platforms like Facebook. It's pretty much a given that these type of people coming in with a passion for the end result are going to be different from the geeks for past generations who were just as obsessed with the process of programming.

PHP is ideal for seeing a quick result. HTML + PHP is the most rewarding platform ever invented in that regard. Naturally, many of these individuals will evolve and outgrow PHP, but it's also powerful enough to keep a lot of talent around just due to inertia. Ease of deployment is just one piece of this perfect storm.
Websites are a small corner of the Python world, but all of the PHP world.
I imagine they would be quite defensive based on the amount of hate they must receive.
hash the state..

even then, if the period is very long it might be problematic
You fix it by giving Windows and OS X package management. It's not something one app provider can do (well, maybe Apple could bundle it with iTunes...)
It's created by Microsoft, who will drop a technology like a wet stone when it's no longer profitable and abandon developers relying on the platform

I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. You can run Windows 3.1 apps on Windows 7 if you must. Say what you like about them, Microsoft's support for their own legacy code is among the best around. The one notable time when MS "abandoned" developers was VB6 -> VB.NET and there was plenty of time to migrate over.

And yes Haskell is more elegant and has a more robust community but F# has all of .NET already, whereas Haskell (and OCaml, and Erlang) all suffer from a lack of commercially relevant libraries.
When I was learning to play the violin, my teacher had a very strict method for going through the repertoire. You had your working piece, which was supposed to be hard - it was stretching the abilities of what you could do as a violinist. You had your polishing piece, which was your previous working piece where you were finessing all the fine points of technique and musicality. You had review, which was all the other pieces you'd learned so far. And you had your preps, which were little passages (4 measures or so) from your working piece that were so hard that you played them over and over again, way slowed down, until you got them right and could speed them up and incorporate them into your working piece.

I've tried to do something similar with my work so far - a working codebase that I'm just learning, a polishing codebase that I basically know my way around in, and various tweaks and bugfixes that I have to do for previous projects. It's a bit harder in the corporate world though - while Google engineers are given a lot of freedom to pick their projects, they're still subject to the needs of the business, and sometimes a project will come up that's such a great opportunity for professional visibility that I'd want to take it even if it involves working hard on something I already know well and dropping the polishing of stuff I just learned.
It's interesting how effective this commercial is without actually doing much of anything... I like it.
A Pretty Pink Little Browser for the Ladies
Simple Living Through the Global Recession
To be honest, this would just creep me out... the last thing I wanna do is pull up this app and realize the plague is knocking at my door.
This is what I love to hear (now to get those Twiddlr kids to let me run a local instance...).
In the last twenty years we've gone from where microcomputers were generally isolated to our now highly connected world with social networking and botnets, all the benefits and security risks that entails. Programming languages in the mainstream have seen great changes in the past twenty years.

River flow does not stay the same. The rate of flow changes with the seasons and geographically, rivers can move over time, depending on local geological conditions.

Doctors are makers of new, otherwise where do our medical advances come from? They have to explore the unknown to make it known.

Yes, "primitives", our foundations in digital technology and programming fundamentals are the same. We still use collections and algorithms, and our computing technology is still rooted in the core theory of the Turing machine. This knowledge is very important, but it really is still just the foundation which we need to be effective, develop expertise. The tools we use today, the applications and libraries and languages do change rapidly. And that is where the interactions are complex and change all the time.
Even without Mono you can download the compiler for free.

On Windows you can even use it with the stripped-down Visual Studio shell. http://www.11011.net/fsharp-in-visual-studio-express
Does anyone think this would be an interesting problem for AI? I mean while you are coding have some software watch what you are doing and suggest standard libs that you might want to have a look at?
It seems like standard information management techniques are already being applied to the documentation. While I'm coding in java I can get java doc for the class I'm working with to come up as mouse over.
Maybe it could work like a recommendation engine for libraries.
I think it's a fair knock because it is so prevalent in the screencast (which he mentioned). If it's in the sales pitch, it's fair to knock.
Ok, but there are products, and there are products. This is a product that you can hack to your heart's content, not something sitting on a store shelf that you can take or leave. Oh, yeah, and you get it completely for free. And with a license that you can base your N-million dollar company on it with no ifs ands or buts. And could potentially save you thousands of dollars worth of work. And with developers willing to contribute their own time to make it work better for you. And yet you can't write an email saying "hi, this almost works for us, but has a few issues I'd like to talk about (and potentially help fix)".
Basically, you'd have to be a major-league asshole to argue with a kindergartner over technicalities.
It's so true. In order to evaluate open source software you have to have someone competent set it up. However with a software vendor they can provide a demo and you can have different key levels of management evaluate it.

I think the problem is one of expertise and motivation. A software vendor will necessarily be an expert in their own product, and they have a huge incentive to sell it. Internal IT staff are not going to be expert in some random open source package. Their expertise is going to be domain knowledge, and their interest is just to make sure things are working smoothly. In theory they would prefer better quality open source software, but in practice they need someone on the hook to blame when things go wrong just as the brass does.

I think this could be changed though. If a corporation had the mindset that they wanted their IT to be a competitive advantage, recruited and paid accordingly, I think a large corporation could mop the floor using the right mix of proprietary and open source.
Most parents aren't very good at thinking critically, just like the population at large.
I hope he sees the hypocrisy in being the creator of a slow (relative to Java/C) language which had a selling point of being productive and easy to use criticizing the next generation of web programming (frameworks) for having these exact same attributes compared to what he made.

Also, the PHP framework world blows, I tried Zend's Framework, Cake, and Symfony when I had a boss that refused to use anything non-PHP, and they just don't have feature parity with Rails (though this was a year ago). They also don't have as many mature plugins available as Rails (and a web programming language lives and dies by its libraries).
The U.S. needs the technologies and the explicit and implicit fabric of rules that Europe uses to govern people in crowded areas (hint: it works! go on a visit).

Individualism doesn't work anymore in the U.S. - not in litigation, healthcare, transportation, crime, city planning etc. The U.S. needs to become more European.

My two cents.

I'll decipher this: if the U.S. would have effective city planning, crime prevention and a social welfare system, there'd be less bad neighborhoods to worry about and in result less crime. Further, if employers would actually hire people for longer periods of time then longer standing communities of people could form where several generations would know what's going on in the neighborhood. Further, if you would add good public transportation and kids who know how to ride on a bicycle, you would finally have European conditions => kids could go to school on their own.
One thought I've had:

Do this for education and textbooks. Has anyone tried to create a simple iTunes LP themselves and open it in iTunes.
It's a bit like saying Ford cars are crap because they don't fly well. It's knocking the wrong thing.
Frank Wilson (of A VC / Union Square Ventures) adds more: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/09/seth-on-freemium-abundance-a...
I like both Haskell and F# so perhaps i can give some reasonable counter-arguments.

1) F# will be integrated in Visual Studio 2010. Large commercial companies like banks use F#. It is very unlikely that Microsoft will drop it.

2) Actually the F# team responds very quickly to bug reports. Just send your report to fsbugs@microsoft.com

3) F# is not yet open source, but the source code is available. They have promised to eventually open source it like Microsoft has done with IronPython and IronRuby.

4) Visual Studio Express editions are free. It would be nice if MonoDevelop had a good add-on for F#.

5) No arguing with that. Haskell can be very elegant and has a very good community.

6) I could argue that F# is more cross-platform than Haskell. Despite Simon Marlow's amazing work Haskell's Windows support is lacking compared to Linux. There are no current plans for GHC to support 64-bit on Windows and several Haskell packages use low-level C libraries which can be less reliable on Windows or difficult to compile whereas the .NET framework and Mono function as a common abstraction layer between Windows and Unix.
Cool. I don't care much for PHP, but I worked with Rasmus briefly at Linuxcare, and he is a cool guy.

And, when it comes down to it, PHP has made it possible for more people to do more things with the web than before it came into existence, so you do have to give it some credit. With the caveat that it's easier to write those kinds of nice things when I'm not currently being forced to deal with any PHP:-)
When the author talked about scanning the video for "interesting" parts he mentioned pattern recognition. Does anyone know if data compression is used for this in applications? The idea being that if you have 12 hours of cctv footage that is mostly just the same view of a warehouse most of that will compress very well but not the 15 or 20 minutes where there were people walking around.
I'm not reading anything you're saying as being negative towards twisted.

The thing, is twisted isn't a web framework, so nobody should find it surprising that it doesn't make it really easy and obvious how one would go about making a web site with it.

A lot of people nowadays seem to look at a programming language and think "yeah, but where do my HTML templates go?" Most of the things I've built in twisted don't have web interfaces. There's a guy in the list now trying to figure out how to get his IRC MUC sending out ICQ alerts through OSCAR -- now HOWTO there, either. :)

This feels more like a python vs. ruby discussion than anything else to me. One has a community that focused really hard on making a very rich web framework and the other can do web stuff, but isn't quite there. In both camps, you have extremists who can't see why anyone would use the other. In both cases, they can be better. :)

So I'm hoping others will contribute to making the twisted web story better.
I have been happy and responsive..... and it has never had to come..... OS X!!!!!
probably true for a lot of places http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
The Boss - First, $99. Then, Millions.
There's a new Netflix Prize coming up; this one will be time-limited. Most contestants shared a lot and made it a very interesting experience; many got contacts in industry that got them good jobs or started their own companies.
Mobile users may also use the web for shorter sessions on average than desktop users, so they don't have extra time to click on ads. The average mobile user may also be savvier than the average desktop user.

Both those points are pure speculation on my part; data to confirm or refute would be welcome.
Yes,

There are a lot of hn news posts I've made that I think I could make into blog posts or even articles. But I can't claim they already are in a form people will pay attention to.

For example, the posts I'm most proud of generally get few mods whereas simplistic but irrefutable objections to some other story tend to get the highest mods. But that's logical. People just aren't reading the ten or fifty posts on a paper to find the gems. They might read the first that way if you're lucky. Otherwise, they are more likely to skim. Even on the web, the writer has to present their ideas so they are accessible.

(And here I go again. This post will get far less mods than statements like "where's your evidence")
It's heartening that the book mentioned in the story, "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry," has 5 stars from 61 reviews at Amazon. From what I've seen, it's incredibly hard for a book on any topic to get 5 stars from a statistically significant number of reviews. Hopefully this portends that many feel the same way.

Now if I could just get my wife to discuss child raising without her getting defensive. (She went through a bitter custody battle with her first husband who continually accused her in court of being a bad mother. And hey, I'm not perfect, I could probably approach things better with her.)
http://code.google.com/apis/finance/
I expect yahoo has something similar.
Discount Antivirus and Internet Security 2010 Software
Compilation of best antivirus software prices and deals that includes products from Norton, AVG, Trend Micro, and Check Point ZoneAlarm
But as soon as you move away from simple apps under light load into real applications, it is no longer enough just to rely on PHP magic. You find yourself needing to understand the innards of what is a very complex environment, and dealing with an idiosyncratic development community that considers ad-hoc exposure of C libraries a neat programming techinique, and likes to publish its documentation as comments on a web page. ;-)

PHP occupies an unfortunate middle-ground: it's less productive than Rails or Django, but less performant than C++. If your site really gets to Google- or EBay- or Facebook- or Twitter-scale, it's probably worth rewriting it in C++.

PHP, Python, and Ruby all have fairly easy-to-use C interfaces, so it's not that hard to link in the performance critical parts later as you rewrite them. Given that PHP isn't an effective final solution anyway, why not start with something a bit more sane?
Citation needed.

BTW, in addition to wikipedia's contribution to society of a free encyclopedia, I think this phrase is a great contribution. As Gerry Sussman says, "once you can name a spirit, you have power over it."
True, but the thing F# has that other MLs don't is the .NET libraries. There's not much you can do with Mono F# that you couldn't do with OCaml, Mythryl, SML/NJ, MLton...
"You can't just work on someone else's framework and make it simpler"

Are you suggesting that python is more complex to use than x86_64 assembler?

Similarly, when I removed code from tornado to make it work with twisted, I neither tornado more complicated to use, nor did I introduce any limitations.

The "too complicated for many uses" thing kind of bugs me, though. It's the same argument people use to use for postgres vs. mysql. Something along the lines of "it has features I don't need" (where need probably means "understand" or "need today").

That's where tornado left me. What you call complication, I call features. I use some of these features.

For example, I'd be interested in knowing how something like my tdf web server could be written in tornado. It attaches processes to resource paths, captures and transforms the output from these processes (in a stream) and streams replicates of that data to whatever connections come in.

The answer, of course, involves reimplementing reactor.spawnProcess on top of ioloop. Then you find some of the subtleties contained therein. Then you begin to understand why it seemed complicated to begin with.
I don't follow... Ford doesn't sell their cars by showing how easy it is to make them fly.
I like the original better...before they Photoshopped out the black cat!
Ideas have value. Most good ideas are a result of the unique perspective of the person who has them. Many years of life experience (working in an industry, talking to others, etc) usually go into coming up with a new idea, not to mention research and detailed thought about specific problems.

Ideas are very common, every person has them. But good ideas are rare. Consistently coming up with good ideas is difficult, and it might be worth it to give some thought to the process.
> The fully connected graph is a red herring. Until we properly invest in monorail technology

Don't you mean maglev rather than monorail? Monorails aren't especially fast.

And even with expensive maglev techs, NYC to LA by train will still be long and painful. I don't expect that kind of travels to be worth doing by train (rather than plane) until we manage transcontinental vacuum-pressurized maglev tunnels.
A good first approximation already exists: Searching by function type in languages (such as Haskell[1]) that have sufficiently expressive type systems. There might be integration with e.g. the Emacs mode for Haskell* , and if not, it would certainly be feasible.

[1]: Hoogle: http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

* I haven't used Haskell for a while, though, so I don't remember if the Emacs mode currently supports searching by type.
once a month you go through that month's folder, once the folder has been viewed what do you do with it ? do you put in the drawer file cabinet never to be seen again ?
What a gReat idea.
Scaffolding does not make Rails fast or slow. It's code generation that happens prior to run time.
Mintty is actually based on PuTTY's terminal emulation and Windows frontend parts, but it's tailored specifically for Cygwin. This results in smaller size and a simpler UI.

It also improves on PuTTY's terminal emulation in various ways, in order to make it more xterm-compatible. For example, it supports xterm keycodes for modifier key combinations such as Ctrl+Arrow.

There are also a few additional features such as mousewheel scrolling in 'less', window transparency, and the ability to place the command line cursor with a mouse click.

Mintty can be used for remote connections too, by simply running the likes of 'ssh' or 'telnet' inside it.
It could also be that propositional calculus is dead simple - or at least that has always been my impression of it. Calculus and linear algebra work on complex problems in a large domain. Propositional calculus has a small domain and fairly simple theories.

I think in general, the knowledge domain is important. Linear algebra is a very unified field by itself but when you get courses that involve a grab bag of algebra, linear algebra, trigonometry and calculus, I think the "stew" they present is incredibly hard to comprehend on a high level and students wind-up either failing or learning by a horrible kind of rote.

Uh, this is from biased personal experience. I indeed only taught one college math course when I doing my math MA, it was "Trignometry". It was a complete failure. I still blame the "grab bag" quality of the material but perhaps I was to blame instead.
Speaking of OpenOffice.org... People need to stop pushing it as equivalent to MS Office. It is so obviously inferior that people write off your opinion. It's ugly. Complex formats break. Last. I checked the was no grammar checking. Calc is similarly useless when comared to Excel. The only reason I use it is I run Linux.
Is it Possible to Hear Electricity?
Nice discount compilation you got there, especially 25% Off AVG Internet Security and $19 ZoneAlarm Ativirus. 2010. I just hope there is Panda Internet Security 2010 special promotion.
A coworker of mine refused to fly on the 4th anniversary of Sept. 11. When I suggested it might actually be safer due to heightened security, he became defensive. "When you have kids, you'll understand."

Well, I now have two kids (aged 2 and 3 1/2), and I still don't worry about breaking a mirror, walking under a ladder, or flying on Sept. 11.

I also want my kids to have a kind of self confidence and basic trust in the world. I think the local news is addictive, in the sense that it feeds a fear of not going out in the world, but instead staying glued to the TV.
A kindergartener with pictures of bunnies and kittens. Pretty much any attempt at rebuttal is null and void.