skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are your thoughts on "hearing electricity"?
Have you ever experienced a similar phenomenon?
What scientific explanations have you found or do you know about?
"Twisted is no doubt more complete in terms of protocols and such, but many people also value simplicity. One important point that I think has been overlooked here is that the core of Tornado is only a few hundred lines of code."

I think this is a bit misleading. The twisted port involved removing almost 1,400 lines of code and didn't change the tornado API. That is, tornado is not more simple without twisted.

I do understand the value of being able to read all of the code quickly, but there are other turtles below these. For me, it's very valuable to know that the part upon which I'm building is a well-tested codebase whose semantics I understand, and for which I can write tests when things begin to violate my understanding.

If tornado is used in more applications, it will have to grow in complexity to meet the needs of those applications. I see tornado as having two faces. The web portions can certainly continue to grow, but the network IO handing just means that people will have to port over things that already exist within twisted, and expand it in complexity (such as the kqueue work that is in progress) to handle more low-level stuff.

At some point, you can't just easily sit down and read all of it (at least, not any more easily than you can with twisted).
Making OpenID Usable
That will be eAsily understood. I prefer the <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags. ;)
Nice solution, writing the thought or blogging about it is definitely a good way to anchor it in one's memory for future reuse.
I detest PHP, and have been lucky enough to mostly avoid working with it. But I'm currently leading the development to convert an 80k line PHP app to Rails, and I'm absolutely shocked at how fundamentally flawed PHP code is from the perspective of general best practices in software and web development and also computer science. PHP code is so bad that it deserves it's own section on dailywtf.com.

I think PHP has been successful because it's the Visual Basic of the web. Just like in the 90's with the programmer "holy war" between Visual Basic "developers" versus everyone else(C++ mostly). At that time the number of "pseudo-developers" dwarfed the number of "real" developers, and so Visual Basic ended up being used for all kinds of stuff, in companies all over the land, and for all kinds of software for which it was totally inappropriate.

It was termed "Virus Building" for good reason, and not just because M$ software was so exploitable. With Microsoft dominating the desktop, they were able to embed Visual Basic everywhere. It's the oldest trick in the book: if you can be the distribution platform, your default tool set will end up being the most used simply because people are too incapable and lazy to tweak and customize software themselves. To paraphrase Steve Jobs' remark about people reading: "people don't tweak anymore".

There's been a similar demographic split on the web for the past decade. The number of web developers who know nothing about software engineering in general dwarfs those who know best practices, computer science and stuff like that. Add in the sweet spot of the entire hosting industry defaulting to Apache and the LAMP stack, PHP got to be the default tool, like Visual Basic on Windows desktops. It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers--we can only wait for the platform to change, then PHP will be dead, just like how Visual Basic is now "dead".

Perhaps the whole "cloud computing" hoopla and mass move to VPS will pull the rug out from under PHP in the next 2 years.
It's not a 16% droping trend, or the recession. There tend to be good years and bad years for game releases. If you look at the NPD stats for more than one year in the past you can see that. Last year was amazingly good - loads of well-received big hitters. This year's a slow year and is consistent with sales from other off years.

Many of the big titles that were due this year have been put back to a 2010 release. This Christmas we have only have three big-hitters: Assassin's Creed 2, Uncharted 2 and Modern Warfare 2. Good for publishers of those three I guess. We also have the recent releases of the PS3 Slim and Rock Band: The Beatles.

Next year we get all the games that were delayed this year (Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction etc.) on top of a number of good releases that were originally due. I predict that 2010 will be an on year.
It's a shame.
On the other hand, this comes at a cost. My name is Martin C. Martin. I was born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar, and changed it in college. A dutch friend remarked that changing your name is very very hard in Holland: a roofer whose last name was the Dutch word for leaky had to go through all these hoops to change his name. He said that, in general, Europe has a kind of conformity.

From what I've seen, many European countries are also racially homogeneous, and a little xenophobic. Even Geoff Hinton, a big name in Machine Learning, had to move back to Canada after a few years of living in England because his black son encountered an overwhelming amount of discrimination. And I think England is more racially diverse than a lot of European countries.
I am of the opinion that good ideas are generally the sum of worthwhile but small ideas and that there is in fact the need for "coagulate" these together to have something worth it.
Python coders who tried Google CodeJam ?
Google CodeJam doesn't have a feature where we can sort solutions by language and almost all the solutions I checked are in C++. Are there any python coders on HN who tried GCJ. Can they share their codes ?
You missed the part about deployment, though. Most users aren't going to install Python (or whatever) for you, and that complicates things.
Comparing an interpreted langauge like PHP with C speedwise doesn't make any sense. Even Java is semi-compiled to an intermediate form unlike the strictly interpreted PHP.

Also, in my experience there are plenty of libraries available for PHP. It comes with a lot more built in functionality than other languages.

What I like about PHP over Ruby is that it has a more comfortable C-like syntax. In comparison Ruby is more like Basic than C. When I use Ruby I miss the simple curly braces of C or PHP. In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code.
This is what mindmapper like freemind allow you to do. I am very much interested in hearing about the next step. When one has one or several mindmaps, how do these grow old ? do we see a larger mindmap of the smaller ones, something else ?
Nice solution. But in that process you don't really have a history or version control of this document.
Yeah, it does. And having seen those kids blindly step into the road without looking, as if their reflective vests would magically stop the cars, I'm not sure that it makes me feel that much better. :-(
How To Prevent & Stop Premium Text Messages On You Cell Phone Bill | How Hood
“Why Don’t Students Like School?”  Well, Duhhhh…
This story has so many missing pieces it's not even worth reading.

What I want to know is who's the engineer he suckered into getting his first codebase up and running?
There's one other benefit of Ubuntu that is worth pointing out: there's only one source of automatic updates. The auto updates on OSX and windows drive me nuts because every app has their own updater with their own UI and their own preference for whether and when and how to update.
It's sad that professors are promoted for research, rather than either research or teaching. It amazes me that the private U.S. universities that are most highly ranked for undergraduate education are the ones with the best research.
what is possible with F# and not with C# ?
gOd!
1- license tech now, pay later

2- ?

3- profit!
Desperate, part 2
Stop it. You're going to summon Jon Harrop. HN is so pleasant without him.
It basically summarized his book up in 2 minutes. It leaves out all the details and good information. It's articles like these that do entrepreneurs a dis-service:

a) You don't get the nitty gritty important details on how he really did it. You should definitely read his book to find that out btw.
b) The focus is on the zeros and commas, making everyone think they can make million on teh internetz easily.
Parenthesis omission.
AMD to End Gigahertz Wars - no longer marketing by tech specs
summary: brain fails to garbage collect reference cycles
"Hello John.  It's Gordon Brown"
I enjoyed the article, but it was all over the place. It ended rather abruptly too. Props to this guy for jumping on board when he did, and getting out when he did.
How about getting to know your problem domain in depth instead?

If I had wanted to be a biologist, or a businessman, or a banker, I would have become one of those things. My domain is computers, and computers are what I am interested in. I will take playing with pointers over $different_kind_of_work any day. I think it's just a personality thing, but that's the way it is for me. I would guess that a sizeable minority of programmers are like that.
WinPatrol The Computer Guard Dog | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Building your Minimum Viable Product
"although I’m sure there are still lines that need to be deleted before everything works."

That's not something you hear very often :)
Yup. That's why I moved to Canada for a while at least. Want to try out the so-called freedom you guys in North-America have. Pros and cons.

EXAMPLE: 1/2 h ago somebody stole my mountainbike right out of my garage. Here in North America nobody saw the guy. In Germany, usually the neighborhood widow next door lady would have seen the guy looking through the kitchen window.
Tornado relies on a small number of well defined system calls (such as epoll). For me, the difference between reading (and debugging) a few hundred lines of code down to the system call level, and reading (and debugging) a big library like Twisted is rather significant. For you, the difference may not be important, and that's fine. I also don't think that it's necessary for Tornado to replicate all the functionality of Twisted -- if people want Twisted, they should simply use Twisted and ignore Tornado (and hopefully the Twisted team will have borrowed the best bits of Tornado anyway).
iPhone version coming out in a few weeks. (I emailed him about this.)
I think you're right but I keep hearing people at Microsoft describe it as a research project so I figured better safe than sorry.
It's a sufficiently small sample that we could study each case, figure out how it may have been prevented, and maybe get the metric up from four nines to five.

Also, I wonder what the historic measures are. Back in the eighties, we weren't coddled nearly this much, but there was a reasonable amount of crime. How many children were abducted then?
might enjoy reading his personal site

http://www.chahal.com/
I think the author is misinterpreting what's going on. It's not that it's too hard to communicate with the Twisted folks, it's that the FriendFeed folks didn't think Twisted was good enough. Twisted is too buggy and too complicated.
plausible. Time will tell on this one, I'll keep an eye out for updates.
Brevity and correctness.

I wrote a program last month to download a CSV file from the web, parse it, check for dupes, and load it into a database.

It took about 20 lines of F# code.

With C# I couldn't even start on the project with that few lines of code.

It's a lot like SQL and stored procs. If you don't know what you're doing (like me) you thrash around using cursors (for-next-loops) and such making a mess the first time you try to solve a problem.

But then, as you get the hang of it, it all "collapses" into this beautiful, small, piping one-line-type syntax, like one of those origami models that goes suddenly from being folded paper to a bird or something.

If you've ever done this with stored procs and cursors, starting with a lot of cursors and eventually using a regular SQL statement to do something that used to take many lines of code, you know what I'm talking about. It's a thing of beauty. I'm not convinced it reads any clearer (although FP folks say it does) and I'm not convinced large code bases are easier to maintain -- but then again I'm not convinced you'll really have the kind of large code bases you see in C#/Java/etc

Ironically, this means that data structures are the critical thing in functional programming. Even more so than in imperative languages. (In my opinion)
I'm not complaining about the hosts, I'm complaining about the extreme focus we put on the language being used rather than the products being made.
How did MagSafe -- a hardware feature -- convince you to switch to OS X? Plenty of people run Linux on Apple hardware. Not to discount your decision, but MagSafe wasn't really the deciding factor.

> Endless driver issues were another reason

Really? Not to discount your problems, but if you choose your hardware wisely there aren't that many problems. That said, a lot of 'driver issues' are to blame on the manufacturer (i.e. NVIDIA sometimes has massive drive issues even on Windows; back in the 90's ATI was know for their atrocious driver support on Windows).
Free Casual Games - Top 5 2009
It's actually a fairly effective technique if you look at history.

Apple always used to make commercials about their own products which led to Microsoft's "nitpick ads". Now Microsoft's going positive and Apple has, for reasons I don't quite understand, chosen to go on the defensive (The most recent "Puddy" ad is obnoxious)

I have no solid numbers to back it up but I personally like Ads where companies tell me why they're great much better than Ads that tell me why their competitor sucks.
As far as I know (which is from a minor amount of personal experience and a major amount from my electrical engineering degree), most humming and crackling sounds are produced by corona discharges and they are generally heard only near overhead power cables operating in high voltage ranges (i.e. 6kV and above). That said, I have heard humming sounds from older tube lights too. Apparently this indicates a faulty choke.
The shells are fine; it's the Windows console window that's the problem. I think both projects use it by default to ensure compatibility with programs that use the low-level console API. Sadly, there's no official or straightforward way for intercepting output from such apps.

There is an API for accessing a console's screen buffer, which the Console2 project uses to put a better UI on the console. That approach still has to rely on the console's substandard terminal emulation though.

(Btw, you should see MS's "Subsystem for Unix Application" for a truly atrocious default config. It doesn't even have command line navigation with the arrow keys.)
Embedding a Web Browser in Emacs
There's a whole collection of these kinds of article at http://hanson.gmu.edu/econofsf.html
The Evolution Theory Upside Down
You can make a window executable with py2exe.

http://py2exe.org

Really, everything is going to be pain on window in comparsion to Linux. Since linux was orginally made for programmers by programmers, life is going to be a piece of cake.
Awesome story! Good one John!
If you're prepending code to user-input strings and later popping+parsing it to cause side effects, that's eval.
+1 for Anki. I loaded up a list of GRE vocabulary words in Anki, studied it for three months, and got a 1600. I probably spent two hours studying for other portions of the test. Takeaways: 1) SRS works; 2) the GRE is a joke :)
It makes sense in the context of PHP's creation. When PHP was created, web apps were still commonly written in C/C++. PHP is much older than Rails, even if you don't count PHP 1 or 2.
Canada has much stricter gun laws than the US. The impression I received from the post I was responding to was that the poster was suggesting a positive correlation between the general level of fearfulness in a population and the strictness of the gun laws in the region. Canadians would presumably be much more fearful than Americans in that case. I don't have any statistics to compare, sadly, but at the very least I would think it safe to say that any such relation is decidedly less than linear (or my neighbourhood would be overrun by paranoids), if such a relation exists at all.
I have a better idea - no sarcasm on HN, at all. Because it usually detracts from the discussion rather than enhancing it.
What it takes to get explosive economic growth
It's official. However since it's not yet released it's still considered a research project.
Dreams of Autarky (or What's wrong with the singularity)
How about just adding something at the start of the word. !"#$%&/()='+*

Many characters that can be utilized and are easily added.

I think it's a !great idea
Dmitry Medvedev declares official holiday in Russia: Programmer's Day
Excellent, now I never have to leave emacs ever again
"I'm complaining about the extreme focus we put on the language being used rather than the products being made."

What "extreme focus on the language"?

Simply mentioning "Ruby" in the context of a Ruby-only hosting company's decisions does not constitute "extreme focus" any more than mentioning "Python" or, more recently, "Java" when discussing the Google App Engine. It's completely uncontroversial to anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind.

Also, the services provided by the companies (or as you put it, "the products being made") are Ruby and Git hosting, with EY also maintaining several Ruby implementations. I'm not sure how you could say anything about EY's "products being made" without mentioning Ruby.
> In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code.

I also don't like Ruby's syntax in this regard. However I long for the simple ways of Haskell, Clean and Python here, using indentation.
from http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html

> The main thing I noticed about the experts I’ve encountered is they are into impressing you with their abilities. They are usually incredibly good, but their need for recognition gets in the way of mastery. Everything they do is an attempt to prove themselves

An expert programmer is a knowledgeable, yet ostentatious programmer. :-)
> It's totally impossible to "win" against these kinds of numbers

Just redefine "win": Not using the same stupid stuff as everyone else can be a competitive advantage.
I really think the problem is simpler than that; in most enterprises, I think there's literally a company neurotransmitter that doesn't get activated until someone has to cut a check. Until your project gets JBoss-big --- hell, even after that --- nothing you do is going to get open source taken seriously.

I base this in part on a number of friends who have hugely successful open source deployments in their companies (BSD/pf firewalls, for instance), and who are locked in a constant struggle to keep those deployments from getting "upgraded" to "real software".
Are the rest of the details in his book? If so, it's acceptable that a ~650-word newspaper account just provide a taste/tease; it's all the medium can do.
No, I meant monorail.

Once again?

Monorail!

Was I sent here by the devil?

No, good sir. I'm on the level!
tHanks fOr yOur cOncern. But I think we'll be OK.
Ah, yes, sunshine and lollipops. Like configuring sendmail. :)

I use (and really like) OpenBSD, actually, but the point that the article is trying to make is that while open-source users usually tolerate a fair amount of configuration, spotty documentation, etc., those problems can sit ignored in plain view, and people trying out open source stuff may get the first impression that it's incredibly rickety. (And in some cases, they're probably right.) Tedious detail-work such as setting up a smooth installer is very important, particularly for people who aren't themselves programmers.
I presume this is the same btilly with the recent great story about random/spaced repetition in teaching. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367 )

The combination triggers the thought: what if online teaching used A/B testing, to continually optimize not for conversions/revenue but for retention/mastery?
Yeah, there are definitely pros & cons.
Interview: Vinod Khosla Is On The Hunt For Great Technologies
That some people don't get sarcasm is a feature, not a bug.
emacs-w3m is also quite good, provided you're on Unix. (http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/)

Edit: It's a text-mode web browser.
Those of us that use F# don't really care if it doesn't run on non-windows machines. That said, it runs fine on my iMac in a windows vm :)
Really though, it's a great language for writing business software to run on windows and lots of people will find this useful. Its a pragmatic language, not an idealistic one and it only makes the .NET programmer more powerful. Join the dark side
This was actually the first application I thought of when I first heard about uzbl. I'm wasn't knowledgeable enough with elisp etc to implement it myself, but I'll definitely be following this project closely.
I suspect you are incorrect. I think a lot of parents focus in on the sensational media reports of kidnappings and don't think about that street crossing. After all, a child hit crossing the street probably will not make national news, and very few people have any real understanding of statistics or probability. They worry about the sensation rather than the real risk.
The process of collecting the ideas is super easy for me. I use the all-time-and-devises-compatible .txt file. I am attached to 5 different machines. My laptop (Linux) , office PC (WinXP), Home server (Linux), Pocket PC (Wm6) and the work UNIX servers (HP-UX x 4).
Whenever I have an idea I fire the minimalist text editor I have. Usually [ ~> vi idea_description.txt ] then I write whatever on my mind. I don't care that much about the writing; just a mind stream.
Considering me as a media carrier, the 5 devises are in some kind of a network. Every couple of days I collect the ideas from the different machines into single directory called [IN BASKET] in my laptop. Usually through the FTP, email and/or bluetooth.

I don't care that much about making the ideas real. If they are worth living they will occupy my mind a great deal. Which means the .txt file will get bigger and bigger over the time. At the end I will naturally make them happen. By just executing the .txt file in the life environment :P.
Just reading your comment brought back muscle memories - between '72 and '79 I used the first CRT-based text editor I ever saw, and I swear I could sit down at a KSR-33 Teletype attached to one of those old 1 Mhz machines and be almost as productive as with any Mac editor - golly - even the opcodes are coming back - and I can hear the TTY in my mind's ear. Scary.
Amazing what you can do with 30 minutes of peace and an iPhone.

What's really amazing is how much difference one person can make. We're used to thinking that way in our work, but sometimes it takes a selfless act on a bigger issue to show us that our efforts don't have to be restricted to our own projects.

Thank you, John. You are an inspiration.
When you're already at 115 out of all of the children in the United States, there's not much else you can do that a free society would accept. (There are things that, unfortunately, a free society does accept, but I doubt those have an actual impact.)

It's similar to school buses and child fatalities. On the face of it, making school buses safer sounds like a noble goal and something we should do. But when you consider that less than a dozen children die each year in school bus accidents out of, again, all children in the United States, there's probably not much that can be done. (Source: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1289/why-are-there-...)
I suspect it depends very much on where in America you live.
Apple's not exactly on the defensive, but I do think their Get A Mac campaign is nearly at an end. They're sniping with those. I much prefer their industrial design commercials.

This ad was unexpectedly great.
I refuse to use this in the title of my forthcoming self-help book, "Sarcasm Can Be So Helpful In Your Relationships".