skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your examples are interesting, because it's plausible that expressing oneself is impossible without a certain level of education. It's certainly a requirement to express oneself on a global scale. Is a "negative" right (such as free expression) really a "negative" right if it requires something that cannot be guaranteed save by a positive right?

The right to not be imprisoned without a fair trial (a common example of a "negative" right) likewise requires legal representation, provided that there are crimes that have that punishment. Legal representation cannot be guaranteed save by a "positive" right. Does this make the right to not be imprisoned a "positive" right?

The bottom line is that, if you're going to divide rights into "positive" and "negative" rights, you need to choose a place to draw that line. I prefer to simply not draw that line, and assess the costs and benefits of a particular proposition on their own merits. Adding superfluous labels almost never helps.

For example, it's possible that guaranteeing such a plentiful information source as the internet to the citizens of a nation could boost its economy significantly. In this way, its citizens could actually have more money than without it. This is similar to one argument for the American interstate highway system. This is by no means guaranteed, but it is a factor one should consider in evaluating the proposed law.
what's going on with RT Linux? how about try QNX instead?
It's news that marketeers exagerate to the point of lying in commercials?

All they had to do was say it doesn't have CONVENTIONAL blades. But then 90% of the low IQ market this is aimed at wouldn't know what they mean, so they just left out "conventional".
>> "Still, Dyson is a bit of a snake-oil salesman. He makes sleek, designer houseware and peddles it via the outlets frequented by those with disposable income whom are always looking out for sleek, designer houseware."

That's BS. Having recently bought a new Dyson Vacuum cleaner, I'm still surprised just how well thought out, well put together it is. The attachment that uses the suction to spin round a brush for cleaning stairs/cars is impressive enough - the roller brush spins fast, but it still sucks up everything. Let alone all the other unique features. There simply isn't another manufacturer close (Even though they try to copy every feature).

Just because something also looks beautiful, don't assume that's the only reason it's successful. (Also see Apple).
The US lets go of the Internet – will anyone notice?
The New Technorati
Well, the Egyptians invented eyeliner, but that had practical applications and both sexes used it.
Googling [iphone hiking] turns up a number of threads talking about desirable hiking apps, but no app ads. (There may be lots of room for positive-ROI marketing of the apps you already offer, online and off.)
> I'm concerned by the fact that he allows himself to go to such a place without applying the precept "Leave no trace".

You can't "leave no trace". The animals that noticed you behave differently now. Your footprints diverted an insect. (And, if you were riding a horse, the water that pooled in the hoof prints kept a Texas Ranger alive.) Your "waste" poisoned one thing and provided nutrients to another.

You can argue that these things don't count, but the line isn't as bright as your aesthetic revulsion requires.
Google Cache, since the site isn't responding for me:

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:7rjRSf4HfywJ:www.ribbonf...
Agree about the google groups thing. Someone should just register a twitter account for HNchi or YCchi like the Melbourne guys did: http://twitter.com/ycmelb
If you're serious about having decent tool for mocking up websites, I'd highly recommend the latest OmniGraffle Pro, and the Konigi stencil set:
http://konigi.com/tools/omnigraffle-wireframe-stencils

It's expensive, but wasted time is also expensive. As soon as you run into the limitations of using Flash for mocking up your app within mockflow, you'll end up having to redo a lot of things which all takes time.
I think this would be more like if someone else owned bitly.com and raised the price to 400,000 when everyone started using bit.ly
The link to the source code (omitted in the article) is http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory
Some Observations on Real World Software Development Life Cycle, pt. 1
> Would you say that religions force us into slavery because of their tax-exempt status?

Nope - you'd be paying taxes even if certain religious structures had no tax-preferences.

More to the point, you're not paying taxes to the religions. If you've got a beef with paying taxes, it's with the folks who collect and spend tax money, not with folks/groups who don't pay it.
Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted.

I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the world needs more or less of either, etc.
In fairness, HD is gradually enroaching on online video; to some extent, it's been a matter of waiting for the cameras to catch up and become affordable for more than a few. I go to YouTube mainly for music videos now, whereas anything creative tends to appear on Vimeo first.
"Dear America: you can’t have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions, marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and selling underpants on the internet."

Quite a statement coming from someone working on "problems in quantitative finance." Not sure which adds less value, high frequency trading or (insert any activity on earth here).
Interesting how your variable example is pretty much straight against the python styleguide:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

I'd do it just like you do though.

I find it visually harder to fish those equals signs out of the 'noise' otherwise.
From the blog - "I'm a professional freelancer working exclusively in Clojure."
It's the price you have to pay for choosing a brand name whose .com you don't own/can't buy.
Agreed. Also, adjusting street positions is somehow very addictive.
If you ever want a free source of geographical and street data, this is the way to go. Some local cities, counties and states also offer even more up to date files (I find the census one to be a few months out dated for new streets and neighbourhoods).
I posted this there, but I feel more people prefer to read comments here.

---

First, I love both Python and Clojure, and completely agree that Clojure is more functional and aimed towards concurrency (this was its goal, after all). But I feel like you're doing Python wrong here.

> I think this should make a Pythonist a little jealous

No, I think you misunderstood the whitespace rules for Python. First, it isn't set to "4 spaces", it just has to be uniform. You could use 8 tabs if you wanted, or 2 spaces, or 7 spaces. Also, inside of data structures, strings, function calls, etc you can go whitespace crazy. This is valid Python:

users = (# name , id, age, phone
("Frank", 200, 22, "555-1234"),
("Johnathan", 201, 24, "555-3213"),
("Peter ", 202, 101, "555-2312"))

> The last print statement outputs "10" which is surprising to me, since y has never been declared in that given scope.

But it wasn't declared in that scope, there is no scope for 'if'. It may not be what you're used to but you can't blame Python for your assumption of what should have it's own scope or not.

> To resolve it you have to manually call 'del y'

What do you mean to resolve it? Why are you deleting the reference at all? You very rarely see 'del' in real Python code.

> but I can't count the number of C app's that have suffered from memory-leaks and what not, based on the lack of automated garbage collection

What does that have to do with Python? It is reference counted, those values will be deleted when they go out of all scopes, just like in Clojure.

> But this is very different from Clojures concept where immutable means: 'x' never changes.

That isn't what it means in Clojure at all.

user=> (def x 1)
#'user/x
user=> x
1
user=> (def x 5)
#'user/x
user=> x
5

I just changed 'x'. What immutability means is that the value 'x' points to does not change. And that's exactly what it means in Python, too, but dictionaries are mutable (and this is documented). For example, strings in Python are immutable, just as in Clojure. If two things reference the same string and one "changes" it only means that it references a wholly new string.

> Guido is not preparing to transition into modern programming

That's a little extreme. Concurrent programming is valuable, but there will also be many programs that fit single process / thread models very well until the end of time.
Every time I hear criticism of Python's whitespace (indentation), I am reminded once again of how much I appreciate and enjoy it.
World of Goo does a Radiohead. Pay whatever you like.
The is a few reasons that I know of, all of which are historical.

The first is that "www" or "web" were physical hosts in the company's network. These hosts ran the public webserver, but you might also see Spock, Nemoy and Sarek as developer workstations. Every machine had a subdomain, and www happened to be the one that ran the web software.
Note that web.archive.org, for instance, still resolves, as does web.altavista.com

The second reason is/was politeness. It was viewed as an improper use of resources to sent traffic directly to domain.com..
The reason for this is that all domain.com requests need to go up to the top-level DNS servers, where-as subdomain.domain.com will request using your local servers (ns1.domain.com, ns2.domain.com).
Thinking about it today, I'm not sure how much savings there'd really be.. You'd still need to ask the root servers what the IPs were for the domain's DNS servers, but it was viewed by my friends at the time as the politer option.

Finally, and I think this was the biggest one.. Today, we think of the web AS the internet.. That was very much not the case 15 years ago. The web was among the many services that ran on the internet, and people planned accordingly.

domain.com is the root for ALL of that's company's internet efforts. It shouldn't resolve to the web site, any more than it should resolve to the Nameserver, Mail servers, or Usenet servers. They're all co-equal services.
What is the colorful circle?
To give an example in reply to the Clojure snippet that is now mysteriously missing from the article (to demonstrate something Python users should be jealous of)...

This is perfectly valid in Python:

users = [ # Name ID Age Phone
['John', 5, 37, '555-1234'],
['Bill', 5, 29, '555-4321'],
['Jean', 5, 32, '555-4132'],
]

Edit: Always a good idea to test even the simplest snippets before posting them...
FTA:

> After Ev Williams quit Google in 2005, he agreed to work partime for Odeo, a startup that syndicated podcasts through the RSS (the technology that brings blog posts to your Google Reader).

> The gig became fulltime, but Odeo flopped.

> So Ev and his friend Biz Stone decided to focus the company on a product Odeo employee Jack Dorsey had come up with: a site that broadcast the notes people put up in the AOL instant messenger away messages. Thus, Twitter was born.
This comparison isn't very good.

He is basically dinging Python for setting up some pretty basic functions like ireduce(). Wouldn't you do the same in Clojure if something didn't exist? If its just about have short code, I would suggest the line 'import numpy'.

Also for the concurrency parts, if you are talking strictly about the languages and not their implementation, why not compare Jython to Clojure?
Aww, what a bait and switch.
There are a lot of different reasons for this, including the fan blades chopping the oxygen molecules in half.

My cousin had a roommate in South Korea who believed that the fan would create a vortex that sucked the air from the room, creating a fatal vacuum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death#Beliefs
A common benefit of foreign keys is to allow cascading deletes (haven't read if this new SQLite FK enables this).

This is usually a performance benefit for the DB and app processes. It also helps to not_repeat_yourself by having the "business rule" in only one place.
Um, are we supposed to be impressed that their income is above the median income of 2 months shy of 10 years ago? What, did we have no inflation for the last decade?

Not to mention that things like buying a modest house and having two kids seem like pretty reasonable goals for a dual income professionally employed family, particularly one that had managed to save almost 1/3 their annual (pretax!) salary and probably 2/3 their takehome salary. So we can infer they weren't all that wasteful with money. So... if they're struggling, I think the point of the article is we can infer that many are struggling as well.
Why would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it?

Visual FX, video transcoding etc. Rendering times can often be disk-bound, and eat up a lot of time. It becomes aggravating once you start editing HD video, even on a quad-core. For that, the Crucial drive mentioned by Jeff is a win because of the price - the lower random-access performance compared to the Intel drive is not that big of an issue for this application, and even with that limitation it'll smoke my existing system drive too.
This way TRIM would be useful because you're deleting data a lot? Do you cope with that by running linux/win7 aside or do you use Disk Utility to 'free empty space' once in a while?
> It's funny how an automotive industry company can pay its employees a decent salary even while the industry declines

That might be due to the taxpayer subsidies? Perhaps if they paid market (which is apparently ~$10/hr) they may actually become successful again and require hiring more engineers, driving wages back up?
Cloud storage: The consumer's best friend?
They Live Blogged a Sea Serpent Investigation in 1855
Sweet, I'm in. I'll keep an eye on this thread in case the time changes but I'm game for a meetup.

I also love violet hour but Hop Haus is a much better choice for this.
Gem Bundler is the Future
‘I Met a Zombie’
Good move, though the price of membership is a tad steep for a debt-ridden code monkey such as myself.
It seems more like a "I suck at python and I try to be cool using clojure" than any other things.
Oh, and btw, palindrome: x==x[::-1] or reversed
Sure, but if you're making a TV show or the like, it's not unusual to be compositing multiple video streams. TV companies have massively expensive hardware for this of course, but this will be a real boon for anyone who makes a living with multimedia.
Web technology is about to change how we learn
I hear ya, and yeah I've seen the issues related to the Macs on the forums, though I think they've come a long ways in the recent months.

On that note, the OCZ forums are awesome, that company deserves heaps of praise for it's communication with the community. Developers are constantly releasing beta firmware and pre-release (fresh builds) there.
Good advice. Not trying to be mean or say anything about the service, but it was a big turnoff from the moment I saw it.
For a good and concise introduction to basic statistics I'd recommend: "Principles of Statistics" by M.G. Bulmer

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Statistics-M-G-Bulmer/dp/04...

It's kind of old, but it helped me a lot...

Edit: It's also on Google Books, if you want to take a look
My Hoover ( http://www.hoover.com/product.aspx?model=U5780900&ds=fal... ) does all that stuff too. It even has the roller brush for stairs, couches, etc. Even better -- it works!

I'm consistently not impressed with Dyson's BS.
Debug a process using strace/gdb
Developer’s Checklist for a Successful Facebook Application
With the assumption that 'debt payed' means 'product shipped to happy customers', I think that fourth quadrant is a bit of a red herring in that it's not so much a kind of technical debt that must be repayed; but more of a 'technical buyer's remorse' that is a function of good engineers who continuously reflect on the design decisions they've made.
Netbooks are the new Razor Scooter
I wasn't commenting on Bouldr, MrMatt, in case you misunderstood. I just thought it was funny the way Emil was marketing himself - in a vague and half-hearted way, without any supporting statements or evidence whatsoever. So I was just joking about the type of tagline I could see Emil coming up with for you. (It always strikes me as a bit ironic when marketing guys market themselves poorly, yet they expect you to believe they can market your product/service professionally.) Emil could be a great marketer, but he left himself open to a bit of ribbing with his post. I guess he thought it would be better to present his skills privately (?), which is fair. It just struck me as funny.

Sorry to belabor the point, but I didn't want you to think I was dissing your app. I'm sure Bouldr is cool. [I didn't look at it, to be honest, because I'm not really in your target market. I'm going to try to master walking on level ground again before I move on to climbing stuff ;) ]
Is this svn 1.5+? Branch/merge is a lot easier with 1.5's enhancements; I'd guess that most horror stories with merging are when using older versions.

As far as having the whole world in one repository, I'd just avoid it, and not just because of svn's performance in deep directory structures. Surely there are logical parts of the whole that could be separately maintained?

Also look at svn's externals[1], to allow a repository to virtually contain parts of other repositories. The trick is that links must sometimes be tweaked; for instance, if you make a branch and do not want to continue to depend on the trunks of your dependencies, then you must reassign externals.

[1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch07s03.html
I have an OCZ Vertex in my MBP. Great performance, but has definitely gotten slower over time. The folks at OCZ have just released the non-beta 1.4 firmware release that has better garbage collection.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=634...
The other (very good) responses cover relevant ground, but I wanted to address one additional point:

"Sometimes you wind up working for an oblivious or sociopathic boss - but then you need to go apply for another job elsewhere."

The author's term 'productive loser' is defined by the unwillingness to accept risk to ensure maximal compensation. If you agree that the willingness to take such risks is required, I'm not sure that you're truly at odds with the author's original statement.

Further, your 'upper management' examples all live at the 'sociopath' level of the author's corporate pyramid. Sociopaths are eager to pay other talented sociopaths fairly, because they know that they must.
Quality engineering doesn't cover up the fact that it's a dumb idea. The fan didn't need to be reinvented.
Google Wave: too complicated for its own good
Don't use RAM disks -- it's not 1987, you have a grownup operating system with VM and everything.

As long as you have atimes disabled, the only thing RAM disks will speed up is writes -- recent FS operations are cached in memory automatically (and never paged to disk), so reading a 'warm' file doesn't hit the disk at all.

If you really need such a thing, tmpfs is vastly superior -- it operates directly at the VM page level, instead of idiotically mallocing a ton of address space up front (though I don't think anything like it is available for OS X).
Someone commented the other week that this could cause the revocation of certain models... 'approval/certification' for use in specifically defined settings, particularly in formal testing (ACT?, SAT? -- I don't recall) and therefore in classes that work towards that testing. That person made the point that this might have significant implications for future marketshare.

P.S. Not that I'm a fan of the DRM involved.
Download link seems to be down :(
Special Interests Get Peek at ‘Classified’ Copyright Treaty
Read the source to Marcel Molina's AWS::S3.
http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf
Which is not really an excuse for bashing a language on your blog that you clearly haven't even used beyond a hello-world...

He probably could write an interesting clojure piece - if only he left out the uninformed ranting.
I think if you want to do a meaningful comparison of two programming languages you should be about as proficient in both.
Ok, I see that you made some tweaks, which is helpful. I understand that you don't have ill will, but it's important to play fair.

Also, so you don't get in a heap of trouble later, make sure you're posting source code if you're distributing it, as it's GPLv2.
I think that Fowler would say that a design should be constantly evolving. That's the agile philosophy at work. Now, you can agree or disagree if you want to, but requirements change so quickly that it's difficult to not agree with him at least partially.

Therefore, it becomes technical debt when these good engineers reflect on their design decisions and don't do anything about it.
4 kids:

"He spends that time caring for the two youngest children, Shayne and Jackson, 16 months, while his wife takes the two oldest, Zachary, 7, and Kelley, 10, with her to the elementary school where she teaches and they are enrolled as students."
Because you can expect that cost to plummet substantially in a fairly short timeframe, based on past history. Bang for the buck on storage media improves by about an order of magnitude every 5 years.
The ability to express yourself in a certain way isn't a right. Freedom of speech is all too often confused with a right to be heard. It has nothing to do with that.

The right to a fair trial and the associated rights are "weird" because they're concerned with what the government has to do in order to get to violate pretty much all your rights. I'm not a legal scholar, but I think these rights can be classified as legal rights.

I think it's more relevant than ever to be mindful of positive and negative rights -- politicians in western Europe and northern America are very concerned with labelling their own policies as rights when all too often it's merely an excuse to not arguing properly for an idea -- pure newspeak. Take the Finnish here, this actually is a tax on people living in cities to pay for people living in rural areas. But that doesn't sell as well as bestowing a right on people.
Thanks for posting this. Glad to pick this up and support the designers and the model.
Check out the Moca website at www.mocamobile.org

Or follow us on twitter.com/mocamobile
The OP comes across being at the 91 percentile and saying... "hey, wait a minute, there must be blades!" He would have benefited by the addition of CONVENTIONAL.
To me it's a mixed bag. It's like a 'price of admission', if you've been conditioned a life long to look for matching braces (or at least begin, end pairs), and if even languages that are strictly speaking markup languages seem to feel the need for delimiting the end of a block in some way you alienate a large number of people before they've even written a single line.

Compound that with the difficulty of passing code snippets using various media and it is easy to see why so many people argue against this.

You can get used to it, sure. But that's not a very strong argument. I think there would have been ways to get out of this.

Especially when programming using tabs you'd better be very careful not to hit a delete by accident while walking near the end of a block of code. That can really mess you up.

edit: also, for that reason alone any discussion about the relative merits of python vs something else first has to get pas the 45% where we talk about the whitespace. And some people will go to extreme lengths to prove its 'goodness' even when clearly it is not only good.

Being objective about something you like is very very hard.