skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the connection to startup v. career just isn't there, but I really like the analogy insofar as it concludes that it's worthwhile to "meander some in your walk (especially early on)," and "randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain."
my high school colleagues voted me "most likely to go insane." i've been too long repressed, time to let what lurks come forth.
What a lady! This makes me feel ashamed for throwing in the towel with iPhone development simply because the method names were too verbose and hard to remember and the whole deployment profile/signing stuff.. :)
Establish a cap on the number of visas issued, sell them at auction to anybody who passes a background check, and let the market worry about capital allocation between the next Google and Joe's Great Lemonade. The market works better if they are transferable or resalable, but that isn't required.

This would encourage establish a level playing field between startups and established companies for competing for foreign talent, get the US government out of the business of evaluating business plans, avoid anointing any particular VCs as the official Visa Cartel, and be easy to administer and transparent.

You don't have to restrict it to startups in any way, either. It would easily replace the H1B and most other work-related visas. (I can think of compelling reasons to issue, e.g,. spousal visas outside the market.)
My attitude has generally been that if a person is sufficiently passionate about being unhappy that they can even do it when surrounded by the unadulterated opulence that is normal life for a middle-class citizen of a first-world country, I'm not going to try and stop them.

The Internet is ridiculously cool. WiFi is too, as is, for that matter, most modern technology. We are veritably surrounded by awesome stuff. I'm not going to get in someone's way if they are insistent on their discontent, but I probably will laugh at them.
* Imagine you are dropped at a random spot on a hilly terrain, where you can only see a few feet in each direction (assume it’s foggy or something). The goal is to get to the highest hill.*

Who climbs a hill they don't know in the fog, starting already lost and without navigation kit? Silly computer scientists.
Recursion egg rocks!!!!!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=832185
I notice that Haskell has LLVM bindings, and Parsec makes writing parsers remarkably non-painful.

http://augustss.blogspot.com/2009/01/llvm-llvm-low-level-vir...
Build your own Segway: These students did (for $2,275)
Oh, that'll teach me to double-check my posts before I submit them. I meant to say that an LLVM backend wouldn't be hard to add (or, would be cool to add).

Thanks for the link!
Google voice not only replaces visual voice mail, it improves it dramatically.

Apparently, AT&T sunk a massive amount of cash into this feature.

Google also offers the ability to send and receive text messages (a major revenue generator for phone companies) for free.

Google voice basically took every reason you should drop cash on an iphone, and gave it away for free.
you're right that its better than okay, but I don't think its a revolution of collaboration.
You would be better-off researching microkernel architectures, rather than Linux's monolithic kernel.
Why is Photo Start-up DailyBooth (YC S09) So Hot?
I'm interested in how getting out of handcuffs would help you out of a police station. Isn't it like saying that picking the locks on the door to the White House will get you in to see the President?
People keep bringing this up. Is it really an issue across the US? Every gas station I go to has at least one diesel pump in each row of gasoline pumps (Minnesota/Wisconsin/Iowa). Finding diesel, at least around here, is no more difficult than findng gasoline. My wife tends to prefer driving her big diesel pickup, so if she were having trouble finding diesel, I'd certainly have heard about it by now.
The APIs for the Sun Cloud, a very nice demo of REST principles
Thanks for your prompt reply, Actually I meant whether I should prefer MINIX or TUNIX as a guide ?
The things that annoy professional programmers are very different from the things that annoy "amateur" programmers. (I use quotes because I don't want to imply that this lady is not a good programmer or whatever. Her goals are to create a single fun game in her free time, so the things that annoy her are going to be different than what annoys someone who has to write a new "business app" every month.)
getting people to switch from google or whatever their current search engine will be a challenge. look at how much of a marketing push bing had to do to get some traction.

and having this announcement right after news of twine's traffic dropping like a rock is always funny:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twine_traffic_falls_mak...
Very original marketing gimmick.

Edit: as if it wasn't obvious enough, check the hands in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZATuhCoJLc

Of course a story like this brings a lot of traffic to pocketgamer. It's not worth to check if it's true.
The inevitability of growing old scares me like few other things. My biggest consolation is that I should be able to keep creating no matter how old I get - and unlike other passions, this passion of ours only requires a sound mind, not necessarily a sound body.

I want to be like Marie when I grow up.
What Star Trek Predicts About The Future of Information Security
Neat technologies at play here, but at the end of the day, it's all kind of moot. It doesn't matter how many toy HTTP requests per second your web server can do: once you hook it up to a database, a network-based caching layer, or any other RPC mechanism, that's your new bottleneck.

It's nice to have a fast web server, and I'd choose a fast one over a slow one, but it would be nice if these sort of benchmarks included database access or some other real-world web application property in each request/response loop.
How do we un-support the founders visa? Because I don't think VC's should have any say in who can immigrate to the US

But as Immad pointed out, that's secondary. Are you saying you don't support the principle of visas for startup founders? That's what "founders visa" says and means.

I reread the original proposal to see if PG mentioned VCs. He didn't, only an accreditation body of "investors". But even that was an implementation suggestion, not the core idea.
"a lot of doomsayers were getting more credence than they should have...but as always, the "middle way" proves right."

If you're just looking at the rest of the world in comparison to history, then yes, things are getting better. China's economy is growing; so are the economies of southeast Asia. Africa is becoming more stable. Child mortality is falling around the world. This is good.

But it's a mistake to look at that information and conclude that the American doomsayers are wrong. The US middle class has been decimated by the same economic forces that are benefiting Asia. Low-skill jobs are being shipped away, leaving millions of people in this country unemployed, and slipping into poverty. We've had back-to-back recessions, and it looks like neither recovery is going to regain the jobs lost. US citizens are more indebted than ever. There are good reasons to believe that the days of US economic resilience may be over.

We've masked our problems with debt spending over the last decade, but that isn't sustainable. Meanwhile, the first-world credit bubble has been funding the economic expansion in Asia, and we give tons of international aid to help bring down child mortality and cure diseases. What happens when we can't afford that anymore? (we can't afford it now!)

There are reasons to be optimistic about global development, but this guy isn't the "middle way".
FCC To Introduce Net Neutrality Rule
Time vs. Space: how do we apprehend information?
One thing I didn't notice before is that the founders visa idea (however implemented) has the huge advantage of being testable. Startups whose founders got in on such visas would be easy to track. Any big successes that resulted would become prominently associated with the visa program. This would provide political cover against the sort of attacks that are perenially made against H1-Bs and so on. One new Google might even eliminate the controversy permanently. (Admittedly it would be hard to prove that the founders wouldn't have gotten in some other way. But I'm not sure that matters.)
Even if it doesn't get you to see the president I'm pretty sure it will get you to see a judge.

Think of getting out of handcuffs as one layer of security removed. There are others, which will be challenges by themselves, but I can imagine that those would be easier to negotiate when your hands are free. You also no longer stand out as a criminal with your hands out of the cuffs.
(unless you were a bright orange jumpsuit of course).
I'd call it a 'necessary requirement', or even a 'requirement that is good to have'.

Certainly, if I -- as a pretty untrained computer science student -- pick my lock in the largest new yorker police station, well... who cares? Similarly, if you pick the lock of the white house, you probably won't see the president.

On the other hand, if a highly trained marine wants to get out of some police station, he will probably get out of there, and he can raise his chances a lot if his hands are not constrained by handcuffs. (And similar, if a highly trained specialist wants to see the president, he has some chance to do so, and if he can pick any lock in the white house, his chances rise pretty much)
The article is spot on to say that Google (and other search companies) are businesses whose product is the audience and whose customers are advertisers. For search Companies to become a library they not only need to gather the information but also to categorize it and to present it in some logical ordering scheme.
Oh, man. From the title I thought _why came back in a brand new geriatric form - Why the Granny Coder. It's going to be a long day.
It’s a Self, Self, Self Serve World
The hazards of Michael Bloomberg's paternalist utopia.
Ask YC:  What happened to WattVision (YC S08)?
I was pretty excited to hear about this company during their demo day. I signed up for their e-mail newsletter but haven't heard a peep. Anyone have any news?
Because most elected officials don't listen to any citizens much, if at all?
Or you could go the opposite route, and remove existing administrative grey goo that acts as a barrier to entry.

AT&T and Time Warner may be the only companies with cables running into your house, but why isn't there a viable market for satellite/wimax/local wireless mesh/cdma? Why can't other organizations that want to compete run new cables?

I hope at some point we'll stop making quasi-permanent decisions that affect the long-term development of a particular area of society based entirely on people's perceived fears about the status quo at the present instant.
The Future of GHC Haskell : Simon Peyton Jones
Inspiring. Another cogent example of how the reasons we give for not wholeheartedly pursuing a project challenge are really just excuses. I look forward to buying and playing her iPhone puzzle game.

http://grannycoder.blogspot.com/
MIT ’hack’ hits a high note
The rise of Xavier Niel says a lot about French business
A very thoughtful analysis, however IMHO the comment that "we have
all this apparatus to find the data we’re looking for" is only partially correct and an opportunity for hackers to develop applications to adequately filter the increasing noise of the web.
U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra Visits Silicon Valley To Talk Innovation With Woz
Total radio silence since June 10th, see http://twitter.com/wattvision
http://www.whythegrannycoder.com is available if you're interested :-)
O3D - API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications in the browser
print version http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/prin...
I don't care about the ongoing Tornado vs. the world discussion, but there's something to learn about benchmarking here. These benchmarks use a more realistic open system model so that you can see the effect of overload, which most benchmarks ignore.

http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi06/tech/full_papers/schroed...
I'm waiting for governments to realize that export laws as they currently exist just don't apply to software. The way software crosses borders is different (i.e. it's irrelevant whether it does or not; there's no border with border guards to pass), and the way it's created and distributed is different (which is why "containerloads of Firefox" is funny).

I realize the laws probably won't change for a very long time, but hopefully everyone will accept much sooner that they're meaningless and unenforceable.

It was my understanding, though, that the encryption-as-munitions thing had expired and gone away, at least with regard to average strong-crypto programs like PGP. I can't find a good source for that now, though.
In Thunderbird 3, we use a combination of the two models, as some mail providers (Yahoo! for example, IIRC) strip away the right headers. Thunderbird 3's threading is way better than Thunderbird 2's.
Bring Python to the web browser
no they aren't. self extracting DMGs are the recommended (by Apple, I believe) installation method. Open DMG > Application auto extracts to desktop > when first opened asks if you want it moved to Application folder.

why not move itself to Applications folder? You'd probably not find it without looking for it. The desktop is nice and visible.
What the data from 200,000 foursquare checkins can tell you (Socialgreat)
Why would you want to trash prefs? So if in 3 months I re-download the software I have to re-configure it?
While Pixar may have "planned for 3D" from the beginning, I would bet cold hard cash that the director's preferred version is 2D and 3D is just what has to be done for the bottom line folks.

You see, the problem with 3D is that for the addition of the 3D effect you lose SOOO much of the nuance of color and texture as it's masked by the polarizing lenses.

As another voice on the matter, Roger Ebert has a great post on this very subject. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/05/up_up_and_away_in_my...
Actually net discrimination makes ___ over HTTP more popular because then you can hope that the magic black box prioritizes your traffic rather than penalizes it. In a neutral net, tunneling your protocol over HTTP or port 80 doesn't help.
Good luck with the monetization.

It's probably just me - but there is no way I'd want me face on every tweet as I wrote it. Must be a generational thing.
i think these are still pretty complicated. i could understand russel's link in 2 minutes, but I still do not know how to use ACT-R and cogtool.
actually me too. it seems like a reasonable way to compare UI's
12 points by staunch 218 days ago | link

Where's the business model?
-----

12 points by j0ncc 218 days ago | link

Good question. I have a few ideas that I'm going to be pursuing...

Continuation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479352
Woot! Got Canvas3D to create a buffer! (I got distracted by NPR's telling of the ADM price-fixing story, sorry).

Okay, the relevant/revelatory code can be seen at:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/content/html/c...

Here's the string being constructed in the getContext method, after some checking:

nsCString ctxString("@mozilla.org/content/canvas-rendering-context;1?id=");
ctxString.Append(ctxId);

Where ctxId is, say, "2d".

I'd assume it's some kind of resource naming convention or somesuch ... but, anyway, searching for strings "@mozilla.org/" and canvas and gl ...

You get nsLayoutModule.cpp

...
{ "Canvas WebGL Rendering Context",
NS_CANVASRENDERINGCONTEXTWEBGL_CID,
"@mozilla.org/content/canvas-rendering-context;1?id=moz-webgl",
CreateCanvasRenderingContextWebGL },
...

bingo! "moz-webgl" WORKS.

The first example I tried fails:

gl.clearDepth is not a function.

:(

But, anyway, it's a start.
Sure, fair point. However, something that is really important about Erlang is that you don't have to do anything special in your request handler, even if you are doing long-running calculations. Since it has its own scheduler, you just write your code, and the runtime takes care of giving it time slices as needs be.

Of course, this doesn't solve the DB issue, but it's still noteworthy.
You have no idea. There has been a thread raging for the past week on checked exceptions. An earlier war raged over 80 vs 100 columns.
Chapatiz.com : Deviens le King de l'Archipel
Why the location based future will be fragmented
"Not invented here" alert: the BBC neglect to mention that the Soviets (and then the Russians) have been using this route commercially since 1935: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_east_passage .
I may be making a mountain out of a mole-hill, but I think these little things do matter. Python 2.6 introduced the "with" keyword, as you probably know. That's a breaking change, because it alters the language grammar and changes the meaning of previously legitimate programs. And it's a point release. This changes the "it won't break your program" statement to "this will probably not break your program".

When I see a statement that "backwards compatibility is guaranteed", I generally take that literally. And it's really a binary thing. Either it's guaranteed, or it isn't. And with Python it most definitely isn't.

We clearly look at this from a different perspective. I think it's a big deal, and you don't.
Facebook will shutdown Beacon to settle lawsuit
A nuke would be critical mass of U235 dropped on Apple headquarters:)
It's such a relief for those of us who share that fear. I stumbled upon this letter yesterday, it's a complaint that a 98 year old lady wrote to her bank's CEO. (http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art42630.asp)

These two ladies are an excellent example that age is not an impediment for doing things (or doing something about things...in the latter case).
You cannot run all legit Python 1.6 code on Python 2.6 (except perhaps with special flags).

If Python 2.6 would flawlessly execute all Python 1.6 code I would have no complaint.
The problem here is he's misquoting history which is a big issue when your stated goal is to put things into historical context. I honestly don't have the time to critique this guy to the extent he deserves but I picked out a few points just to illustrate what I mean...

Quote #1: "I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony."

I encourage you to read Plato's actual words here: http://www.platonicrelationship.com/blogger.php/?p=411
Plato wasn't against writing (as the author says Plato used it himself) he was against thoughtful debate via writing. He's saying that people who learn by reading rather than by interacting tend to parrot what they learn rather than actually understand the concepts behind it (and he's right in many ways). So Plato wasn't against writing he was just trying to get people to realize where it should and should not be used.

------------------------------------------------

Quote #2: "Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. "

Thoreau wasn't objecting to the Telegraph at all. Read the quote: http://www.allsoulscommunity.org/sermons/2003/BetweenWaldenP...
Then go here and read Martin Luther King's take on it (Search for "Improved means to an Unimproved End"): http://www.geocities.com/thoreaulogy/07sep.html

Thoreau was commenting on the illusion that technology improves the content of our communication not coming out against the technology itself.

------------------------------------------------

Quote #3: "Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. "

I can't even find this quote by Samuel Morse but I suspect what he was saying is that the Telegraph records communication between two people where as the Telephone can't so the telegraph isn't made useless by the telephone. Not that the telephone is itself useless.

------------------------------------------------

Hopefully I've made my overall point. All these people were simply trying to help society decide how to use these inventions not saying the inventions were bad. That's exactly what people are doing now with Twitter, Facebook, etc... and it's a good instinct. This author's aim seems to be embarrassing people with that instinct into silence with false quotes and that's just wrong.
Almost 1 billion trees planted, in a single day
American vs. European style of Software Development
Fireworks - Cheap Thrills with Toxic Consequences
"Far from heralding in a "2001: Space Odyssey" dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man."

That's an odd movie reference. Maybe the writer is referring to the scene where the astronaut is watching a video from his family and reacts very distant and aloof. I thought that was more of a comment on the vast physical distance and isolation involved in space travel, not necessarily by an evolution in attitude caused by technology - his family seems like they are having a good enough time at least.

So it doesn't matter how efficient our social networking sites get or how lovely Facebook chat is, there will still be an 18-minute lag getting the signal on a ship heading to Jupiter.

Maybe I missed the point, but I really like that flick :)
Ah, I see. That definition doesn't fit the situation though. I was using the dictionary definition, and the original article used the word esoteric in the same context as I did.
WTF is wrong with you? That was one of the most informative comments I've ever seen on this site. There was a ton of useful information in there, way more than the short little guide in the OP (which I'm not knocking at all).
I'd like it to be a stand-alone article.
This way it would be a first-class citizen on HN.

I mean, more meat, examples, and soon quite a few more people know how to prototype a language in SML.
Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts
From Plato:

“You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.

What's great about this quote is that it suggests that Plato might have liked the web very much. The web steadfastly refuses to say the same thing forever. (Indeed, it is absolutely terrible at archiving things.) But it supports updates, and revisions, and back-and-forth much better than print does. The two media compliment each other.
Last I heard about two weeks ago, they were still plugging away. I'd expect something soon.
X4Labs  Extender
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Chapatiz : Banque Royale de l'Archipel
So you'd advocate the removal of ftp because Firefox and Konqueror support it?