skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't help matters at all that bash leaks bashism-support when run as /bin/sh -- it's much better that people specify bash than ship scripts that falsely claim to be bourne-compatible (since they are unlikely to test against a pure-bourne shell).

Not having a /bin/bash a losing battle -- it's way too late to get people to use the theoretically more correct #!/usr/bin/env bash just because the greybeard unices don't ship with it (despite shipping with plenty of other GPL software) and their package managers put it (when they are nice) in /usr/local/bin

Edit: That's not a diss on the greybeard unices -- I used FreeBSD and loved it dearly for years. I actually really like that they segregate all user-installed packages into a seperate root at /usr/local/ -- but for practical reasons I always make symlinks for binaries with well known locations (to use the robots.txt / favicon.ico pejorative).
EBay CEO says Skype deal is going to close
it's probably the other way around.
Anyone else upset it won't be called 'Lusty Lama' ?
"The list will be on us"?
I love charts like this, but I don't believe in them because they use something arbitrary like SAT score. I'd hate to live in a world where people were judged by SAT scores; the people within my SAT range are very frequently less interesting than people with scores much lower than me. (I had a score 1510, which places me in the range along with "people whose lives are so miserable they will willingly take SAT prep courses".)

The most interesting correlation is the one between the slightly edgier rock groups and low SAT scores. I know many bright people who are into the edgier scenes, and most of them are the sorts of people who took the SATs too hungover to read the tests in front of them. So the test only works if you're willing to say that everybody puts equal effort into the SATs.

I also think it's hilarious that "classic rocks" includes Queen, AC/DC, Elton John, and Bob Dylan. When your category is that diverse, it's essentially meaningless. I similarly like that Beethoven is the only composer held separate from "classical."
Twitter Gets An App Store
If homogeneity was part of the answer, you'd see Japan and Germany extremely high, and Denmark extremely low. There's no such relationship other than US, what is inconsistent with homogeneity hypothesis.
Human Spaceflight Myth: Bigger is better
Surreal Microsoft vid for hosting launch parties
Naively syncing ~/bin only works when all your systems run the same kernel, on the same architecture, using intercompatible versions of system libraries and programming language runtimes. It also doesn't solve the package management problem at all!

With homebrew, you could sync just the dotfiles and the list of installed packages, and let it take care of installing/upgrading packages on each machine. It'd be even better if it was smart enough to not shadow system packages when they are present+adequate.
There was an attempt to get gentoo's portage working on OS X with the same philosophy, but they gave up and said that it had been a mistake to go in that direction and not just install parallel copies of everything.

I don't know the specific problems they had.
Injecting Arbitrary Python Into EVE Online
Crowdsourced translation
Ask HN: Looking for job in Calgary, suggestions/positions?
I'm looking for a job in Calgary, AB, Canada.

- Ruby/Rails
- Java
- PHP
- ...
Currently working, but it's time to move.
I just signed up for a starbucks card today, so I can get free wireless access. The iPhone app is better because I wouldn't need to carry my card with me. I know I will lose it or not bring it.

The ability to reload money on it is an advantage as well. Not sure if there is anything advantage to a starbucks card in general; discounts, give aways, other than the wireless, but I like the app approach over the plastic in my wallet.
Yeah seriously, bundling over 6000 icons is not really a starting point for a site or app...
Http://istwitterdowndowndowndown.com/
Apple approved 1,394 iPhone apps on Friday
This looks really nice (I'm at the IDF).

Actually there's a new Ubuntu netbook remix being announced as well which looks really slick.

http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download-netbook
Which memes do you recognize as appearing on HN? The only one I can think of is Erlang references. I like the idea of labeling poor arguments against pg's disagreement hierarchy would make a useful meme, though I'm probably wrong and can't see it.

e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829337
"I am not sure but I think in R3 everything except very narrow core of language will be open sourced."

I am not sure if that would be very attractive to hackers. Why would anyone want to use a non open source language these days? Making a language closed source (even in parts) these days is to guarantee that it remains a niche language (unless it has been lucky enough to have a lot of pervasive legacy code, which Rebol certainly doesn't).

I, for one, would never choose a closed source language for one of my projects.
I'm not sure what main application you're referring to.

Every diesel node is an instance of an application that is willing to be provide a service that acts as the master/router for a certain class of messages. Paxos ensures there is only one master elected for every message class, and this router is re-elected should the router go down. The routing table of who is master for what class of messages is kept in sync across all nodes.

It's almost exactly like registered processes in an erlang cluster--reserving the exclusive right to handle certain messages. Simpler master/slave relationships can take over from there.
So, maybe we agree? Because I'm not disputing (and never have) that the message broker is the place to do that. But you seem to be conceptualizing the message broker as a separate _service_ or application, and I'm saying it's just a function, a role. It doesn't matter so much what particular process (or group of processes) it runs in. That's what I meant by "internalize".
I started riding the bicycle to and from work a year ago, mostly to avoid the commuter crush here in Tokyo. The first few weeks was difficult but it got significantly easier as I got more fit. I've hit my goal of getting to and from work in less time then the train.

My motivation lately has been to keep up and pass the numerous mopeds and scooters. What really gets me going is trying to keep up with cyclists on road racing bicycles. I really don't have much of a chance on the my hybrid (cross between a commuter and mountain bicycle + electric assist to 24km/h) but it's always a happy day when I pass the slower road racers. It must motivate them too because they will try to keep pace but eventually fade away after a few kilometers.

The other motivation is thrill of speed on the downhill sections. Another area I seem to have an advantage as the road racers seem to top out at 40km/h. Or maybe I'm just crazy as I'm leaned all the way over to negotiate the curves.

Now that it looks like the burn I feel in my legs is most likely a lie, I'll keep pushing!
I ordered two of these Sept August 1st and STILL have not received it. Emailing them got no response either. People are apparently getting theirs though as there are plenty of posts/reviews. I can't remember last time I waiting this long for something I ordered. Look forward to it though as it will be my first telescope.
Skip hire devon
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> That only works when all your systems run the same kernel, on the same architecture, using intercompatible versions of system libraries

If dotfiles aren't compatible across OS kernels, you're doing something wrong. I keep scripts in ~/bin under VC, but with anything that needs to be compiled I just track the source and build with make (or emacs, etc.). You don't need to put everything in ~/bin in the repository!

From the summary, I don't really see how the system would work transparently across OS X, Linux, and BSD. It looks like it expects git + Ruby + OS X, and I don't use the latter two. (I prefer Lua and OpenBSD, respectively, but that's me.) Also, I work with i386, amd64, and occasionally sparc, and the platform thing isn't an issue since I'm not syncing binaries.
I wish I had the $200k to get this started. This is truly a righteous[1] project.

[1] in the sense of being genuine and wonderful
If TechCruch is always going to defect then leaving them out of the loop is probably a good idea. They are worth less publicity than the non defectors combined so telling them is a bad idea. I think TechCruch has been slowly failing for a while, and this is going to hurt them more than you might think.
Expecting perfection is unreasonable - everything has a failure rate. The question is what's an acceptable percentage of false positives.
I must say that I am impressed with the amount of constructive criticism and feedback here.

Normally commenters on the interwebs tend to be flaming, annoying and very derogatory, but it seems that in this thread (not sure if it's HN specific) people actually listen to other people's music and give good feedback. Impressed!
If TechCruch is always going to defect then leaving them out of the loop is probably a good idea. They are worth less publicity than the non defectors combined so telling them is a bad idea. I think TechCruch has been slowly becoming less relevant for a while, and this is a larger risk than you might think. Still they want to become CNN, or at least make that much profit, and that means they have to leave their niche behind.
Stuff the results of the crawl into Hadoop, write some MapReduce jobs to process the data, and then serve the structured data back up with HBase?
Apple is the second largest tech company (by market cap)
As of today's closing prices, the market cap for the big tech companies are as follows:

MSFT	229.09B
AAPL	166.17B
IBM	158.38B
GOOG	157.80B
CSCO	132.00B
INTC	111.29B
HPQ	111.27B
ORCL	105.84B
AMZN	39.89B
EBAY	30.72B
YHOO	24.15B
Sound has been my one big disappointment since moving to Linux. I cannot believe how broken it is - a hodge-podge of half-built mini tools that don't play nice together and don't add up to anything close to a decent audio environment.

I installed Rosegarden on Ubuntu 9.04 with high hopes, but after hours of monkeying around with it, it flat-out will not play music. Likewise, I installed timidity and what I had read was a kick-ass soundfont, only to discover that about a third of the instruments are simply missing.

Arrgh!
This comment made my day:

"Michael Vergara 23 September 2009 at 6:18 pm #
I am a Docent at Palomar Observatory. At Palomar, we purchased a bunch of Galileoscopes. I think the first order was for 100. We have been giving them away to kids on our observatory tours if they participate as the ‘Night Assistant’ while we demonstrate how the Hale Telescope moves across the sky.
We have not been advertising this, just doing it. 2009 is also Palomar’s 60th anniversary, and it just seems like a great thing to do. The kids (some young, some not-so-young) have all been ecstatic about receiving a Galileoscope, and we’re happy to help another child experience the night sky."

http://www.starstryder.com/2009/09/22/galileoscope-a-dream-o...
And the point, as far as the article goes, is that the cheering happens because of the particular sort of difficulty associated with quitting your job: fear, anxiety, second-guessing the decision. Applause doesn't help side-projects in the same way.
Perhaps it is my terror of spiders of any reasonable size, bit I had to read the first part of that several times until I realized it was goats with prehensile lips, not spiders.

Or that the spiders, cannibalistic and controlling were intelligent enough to teach each other how to escape.

Whew.
Yes, right now homebrew is specific to Mac OS 10.5+ -- the second paragraph of my original comment is pining for portability, so it could be used on shell accounts and beyond.

A major use case is the ability for your app to be able to pull in it's own sandboxed dependencies in a crossplatform way -- so anyone can develop on their macbook independently of their system is set up, and deploy on any worthwhile server regardless of its setup.

gem does a pretty damn good job of this for Ruby libraries, but it doesn't help at all for the native libraries and utilities that the gems are wrappers around :)
And as usual, computers are great at automating tasks, even if somebody else thinks of it as cheating.
The Physics of Sumos (A Flirtation with iPhone Game Development)
When I buy a new MBP I'm going to use this, it's pretty much perfect for my use case and I'm not much of an early adopter as far as developers go. I've tried MacPorts and Fink, but they always inevitably had some issue that made me switch back to manually compiling things to /usr/local.

Homebrew seems like a very nice thin layer over manual builds. Some people maybe can't live without dependency resolution, but the lack of it is one of the main reasons that I'm confident that Homebrew is simple enough that it will help me with a lot of the mundane and annoying issues (ie. getting compile flags right for OS X, etc) without hamstringing me when I need to go outside the system.
CSS Shorthand – Borders, Margins And Padding
CSS shorthand makes coding a cascading style sheet a whole lot easier. In this tutorial, we look at the power of pairs - that is pairing your pixel values when setting them on various rules such as CSS margins and padding.
Indeed. Personally, I see automation of tasks in EVE as cheating, but it honestly surprises me that that's the case. In such an advanced world, you'd expect to see corporations automating defense, mining, etc. I'm surprised that CCP hasn't done something along the lines of letting people automate these things and leave it up to the market as to whether or not players want to do it.

It's a fairly arbitrary restriction in an otherwise very open game.
How To Create Incredible Web Graphics For Free
Ever wanted to create cool web graphics but don't have the money for expensive commercial graphics software? Here's some helpful tips that will point you in the right direction toward creating spicy web graphics for your web site or blog for free!
I'd love to work in an environment where my personality (or lack thereof :p ) is not seen as problem that needs fixing. Currently I'm forced to work in an open-plan environment with no privacy, no noise barriers, nothing stopping random people from interrupting me. It's a disaster for me. I need a quiet space free from people looking over my shoulder and I can do amazing things. Instead I get lectured on punctuality and 'teamwork' by our MD. Rage.
Any idea why the Mac crowd seems to shun binary packages? Before playing with MacPorts I wasn't even aware of the concept of a source-only package manager. Each time I spend 20 minutes recompiling the entire xorg dependency chain because the minor version number got bumped from .1 to .2, I cringe at the thought of how many CPU cycles are being wasted all over the world to produce essentially the same thing.
I am skeptical. I remember watching a demonstration of WinFS only to find out later that it was a Macromedia Director demo. Even if it was real there is some way to go before it becomes a product.
Lunar water detected
DotSpots: Spot the Truth, Connect the Dots
I sometimes feel that programming is the mathematical/logical equivalent of the kludges on this site http://thereifixedit.com/

BTW there are some great JWZ links here http://www.reddit.com/domain/jwz.org
I regularly take my road bike to 70 kmph+ on downhill sections. Some people aren't comfortable with that speed, so it is them, not the bike, that is holding them back.
Well, there's the Unix distro package system and another repository for Ruby gems and CPAN and LuaRocks and Hackage and ... They keep stepping on each others' toes, but I'm not sure the solution is to add even more mutually incompatible packaging systems. By their nature, they need to see the system (inc. what dependencies are available) as a whole to be really useful, and fragmenting that picture makes the situation worse for all involved. (On second reading, it looks like it's designed to try to work with CPAN et al, so that's an improvement.)

It would be nice if it actually worked, but coming up with a perfectly portable global packaging system would be hard enough if it was working across platforms for one vendor, let alone the big mob that is the open source world.
Maybe Netscape's duct-tape programming had some side-effects though...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Every diesel node is an instance of an application

You mean one that the user writes (starting with "import diesel")? If so then I'd think such a tight coupling is a bad idea. Why prevent non-python users from using Diesel as a comet-broker? Why even force python-users to tightly couple their app with Diesel when it'd be so much easier to abstract out the interface they need?

provide a service that acts as the master/router for a certain class of messages. Paxos ensures there is only one master elected for every message class, and this router is re-elected should the router go down. The routing table of who is master for what class of messages is kept in sync across all nodes.

If you're going to all these lengths then why on earth couple it to a comet server? All these features belong in a message broker, not in a protocol endpoint. You'd make many people happy by building a STOMP or AMQP broker with these features, even people that are not interested in comet at all.

Wrt your other reply: No, we don't agree. But at least I have a better idea of what you have in mind now, thanks for that. Also this all is ofcourse just my humble opinion. It's your project and you're free to overengineer at your peril ;-)
I'm not going to look it up, but in some states, people would buy a goat in order to be "farmers" and so get certain tax breaks.
The whole article has a whiff of bullshit even if it seems truthy at times. Yes, OOP is a great fit for GUI programming which helped it rise to prominence, however the rest of it is spoken like someone who has never really done any serious OOP.

I think it's fair to say that OOP is not significantly different from procedural programming, and certainly can't be considered universally better. It just provides some additional tools for structuring the code and data, however it doesn't offer any deep and powerful benefits like functional programming or s-expressions provide.
How far can you get from a McDonald's in the continental US?
For a "real device", it sure does look like a bunch of concept renderings. I predict that this will be as revolutionary as "Project Origami".
Basically, a hacker.
Erlang was more of an inside joke. I'm referring more to the Kanye jokes I've seen here, and similar mainstream memes being quoted within the month or so since I started using HN again.

Used to be people memeing like that would be downvoted instantly. Now we've grown to the point where meme recognition is more of a factor than Hacker News guidelines. It's a very, very, very slow fall, but it's a fall.
"Any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project."

"They xor the 'next' and 'prev' pointers of their linked list into a single DWORD to save 32 bits, because they’re... smart enough, to pull it off."

How is that not even slightly complicated?
Hmmm... that would be even worse. If you're right they not only have something that's trivial, but also opaque - as with almost all soft computing techniques.
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If you read the chapter that Joel recommends, it talks about the design patterns guys that came in and how the anti-duct tape guys had a role to play in that delay.
A simple finger prick blood glucose check[1] will give the current blood sugar level. A doctor's office can also check A1C level that basically gives a longer term (couple of months) look at what the blood glucose level has been.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_glucose_monitoring
I have a prop. ricalexander@gmail.com
Chandrayaan-1 finds evidence of water on the Moon
yawn check out the ODB (for Java) which allows backward and forward debugging.

http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/

watch the author give a talk at Google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3897010229726822034
FWIW, Borland C++ had this on PC back in ~1994. It worked pretty well most of the time.
My point is that naming verbosity depends on the code. This is vague but better than saying "cf. Goldilocks" ("choose anything between two crazy extremes"). My other point is that everyday use of names should be a guide for naming in code. The reason Mama Bear is wrong is that she's too formal. She gives a full explanation of the variable each time, but the 'full explanation' is the responsibility of the var setters, not of the name.

Your Momma Bear either misses the last days of several months, or counts extra days. It also fails to count the LastMonthOfYear. Your Baby Bear is nothing like your Momma Bear, though you seem to be refactoring. Momma counts entire months (look at the variable names, last day of month), Baby does something like "sum the totals from the first five days of Feb-May". These are naming bugs, they aren't irrelevant.

The naming depends on the code. If we're iterating a 3d array and the vars are set directly above, Papa Bear is readable and I wouldn't dick around with it (it might be a convention in the codebase).

// baby bear
for(y=firstY; y<=lastY; y++)
for(m=firstM; m<=lastM; m++)
for(d=firstD; d<=lastD; d++)
sum += getDailyTotals(y,m,d); // line 4

I'm not writing tutorials here. If you don't understand y, m, d in lines 1-3 (especially having seen line 4), you probably haven't been working with dates enough to be messing with this code anyway.

I'm not saying you should choose single variable names, I'm saying they're sometimes ok, and that it's not as simple as "choose names with 4-8 characters".
I haven't read the book yet, plan to get it soon. Sounds awesome.
Silicon Valley is coming back strong and here's why
How To Get More Twitter Followers Using The POWER Of RSS
The first How To Get More Twitter Followers strategy I’m going to discuss is through the use of RSS or Real Simple Syndication. If you’ve been using Twitter for any length of time now then you know that it is a micro-blog.
If you're reusing that nice general list you wrote ages ago with static inlines so that there isn't any function call overhead anyway, it's trivial, because you change the "get next element" and "get prev element" functions and never worry about it again. Complicated algorithm != complicated coding technique. It's simple expression of smart algorithms.
For proteins, evolution can't go backwards
Supposedly if you enable the PulseAudio module-x11-publish option, audio will be forwarded correctly over the network.
The Kinds of Employees You Want to Hire
I did this a few years back for an independent study in college. Once the semester was over I never touched it again though. Hopefully they'll do a better job.

http://carnap.cs-i.brandeis.edu/~dlaz/dev/groupmath/chat.xml, for anyone who's interested.
Awesome read. I couldn't agree more.

I've worked with a great many 'theorists' coders and they never get anything done. They spend too much time abstracting into nothingness. You know.. the kind of guys who remind you of your 3rd grade grammar teacher making sure you know when to use 'whom' vs 'who'...

While I think eventually one would refine their product so that it uses best practices I would say that having customers and a product should definitely be a prerequisite.
I just got mine last week. After some very tedious aiming I got some clear views of the tiny disc of Jupiter through the 50x eyepiece. (I didn't see any of the moons, though.) Now I'm waiting for a good chance to look at the moon! (It was a new moon when the scope arrived, so it's still not out at night...)