skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which means that there's a huge irony here. That cover is notorious for being the worst-of-all-time example of what it turns out Jagger was explicitly trying to avoid:

In my short sweet experience, the more complicated the format of the album, e.g. more complex than just pages or fold-out, the more fucked-up the reproduction and agonising the delays. But, having said that, I leave it in your capable hands to do what ever you want...

It's quite the detail that Warhol went ahead and did exactly the opposite. Of course, the fact that people are writing about it 30 years later just confirms what a genius at promotion he was. I heard an interview with a great album cover designer who mentioned that the zipper in the Sticky Fingers cover had the interesting property of shredding the albums that were sitting next to it. Scissors beats paper.

With that completely off-topic excursion (what, no "how is this HN" rants?) I hereby unplug the entire internet to get some goddamn work done. I wish PG had implemented that "I promise not to be on here for X hours and if I come back before then my user name will be red for all to see" feature. If you see me on here again today kindly tell me to GTFO...
kind of aside, does python support real coroutines yet or is it still just generators?
Sneaky Microsoft plug-in puts Firefox users at risk
The Joel Test – Updated for 2010
There are parts of all languages that I find confusing, but I'm a little puzzled by the general criticism of C++ (e.g., the __getitem__ feature of Python seems to be similar in spirit to operator overloading. Do people criticize Python too?).

IMHO, C++ is an amazing extension to C which managed to increase productivity for those tasks for which C would have been the right choice (modulo non-standard compilers).

If I were writing a performance-critical system-level program today, using C++ would be no brainer. You can fake a lot of what C++ offers with macros and function pointers in C, but lose type-safety and/or performance. I am very thankful to all the people who have brought C++ to the state it is in today.
I wonder when they'll start combining street view with infrared depth sensing to create high detail street level 3d projections...
I would rather risk being bad at selling and get to keep my soul.
The assumption here is that programming is about clever problem solving.

Whether this is so depends on the situation.

The challenge of inventing a new kind of app may be far greater than anything associated with its implementation.

Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to make their job more challenging.
Great post. As a sound engineer and someone who does sound for film, I'm blessed with good hearing and cursed with extreme sensitivity to noise. Most people don't think about it, but it has an enormous impact on mood and productivity, whether you operate a public place like a store or just have a radio in the corner of the office. An ugly sound environment (eg 3 sets of desktop speakers playing different TV feeds at low volume around an office) is horribly stressful and causes my productivity to evaporate. If there's a voice in the background (eg a TV or a podcast) I find it very hard to tune it out while I'm supposed to be reading.

Conversely, adding some natural noise (such as a little water toy, if the water is louder than the electric motor) can help smooth out the rough edges of otherwise unpleasant noise. And fairly inexpensive things like hard disk sleeves can significantly reduce the ambient noise in your office.

Don't get me started on sound in retail environments. I have fantasies about calling in an airstrike on the local 'easy listening' station; and actively seek to minimize my time in any store where it is played. By contrast, low-volume classical music will cause me to slow down and linger. There are two different 7-11 stores I regularly go into (I'm a big fan of their coffee) which have their radios tuned to the 'lite rock' and 'classic fm' stations, and you can likely guess which one I spend more at.

Safeway has a good strategy in this respect. They play generic pop, but it's very quiet, and they make occasional shopping announcements (of the 'great discounts on bread all this week' type), but only one at a time and so infrequently that it feels informative rather than obnoxious. Also, in the vegetable section they have a little gizmo that flickers the cabinet lights and plays a quiet thunder sound every time the automatic mister goes off, about once every 60 seconds. It's very unobtrusive. This was amusing the first few times, but I freely admit I've internalized as a reminder to buy vegetables every time I go there.
Cognitive bias is perpetually fascinating -- especially for people who like simulating social agents in silico (I am a member of this set).

For more see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Every posterous blog comes with built-in commenting
Yes.
One account for AWS stuff
Another account for books/dvds/etc.
Very good points. The author does try to disambiguate "loser" (though I don't think he does disambiguate "sociopath").

My problem with these terms is that they just can't be disassociated with their common meanings. This is a common rhetorical trick - an author defines the word one way, and sticks to that definition, but inevitably uses the impact of the more common word (while claiming that the earlier disambiguation clears him of the need to defend the more common usage).

In short, I think we need a different word than "loser" to describe the category of workers who 1) make a good salary 2) enjoy their work, and 3) yes, could make more money or get a better deal outside the organization.

I'm also unwilling to accept the use of "sociopath" to describe all start-up founders, no matter how airtight the author has been in locking down a definition that avoids all the negative connotations of the more general use of "sociopath."

I guess that I'm really just saying that some words just can't be disambiguated.

In this case, the ambiguity is in the interest of being humorous and interesting, which is why it doesn't bug me all that much (though in other contexts, it can be infuriating).
Confessions of a Car Salesman: http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/article....
The problem with C++ is not just bad implementation. Nowadays we have excellent, standard-compliant compilers for C++ but there are still rough edges. For example, the amount of garbage you get from template errors. You can "learn" to live with that, but it is something broken in the language, which won't be solved quickly. The amount of care you need to to write correct exception-based programs is another. And the failure of exceptions on method signatures show how we should really avoid some of C++ features.
AFAIK only Stackless Python supports real coroutines.

There is also pycsp: http://code.google.com/p/pycsp/
Samsung Ditches Middleman, Brings Blockbuster, Amazon Content to TVs
Operator overloading in C++ is indeed more complex than it should be, thanks in part to the three different ways to pass paremeters (references, pointers, and values). It's definitely more straightforward in languages like C# or Python (or, well, just about anything else) that don't have these explicit distinctions.
Hacker News excites me and i am sometimes a bit scared to post a comment. Now i know what to do.

Watch me dive in deeper baby!
Different problem, different constraints, different solution. And, inevitably, just different ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Please explain how Common Lisp multiple inheritance relates to the question at hand, which is whether the complexity of C++ came from undisciplined language design or was inevitable given the design constraints of the language.
Stop Expecting to Change Your Habit in 21 Days.
I would have to agree. I have no doubt that anyone in the early days of C++ probably had a real bad experience and was right to tell people not to use it at that time.

I personally still use C++ because of the libraries and tools. With Boost, Qt, WebKit, valgrind, gdb, and others I am simply too productive in C++.

If someone told me I could only use the c++ standard library and no other libraries I could probably switch languages pretty quick. I can only imagine what it must have been like before when you got nothing.
"Sticky Fingers", though, was not a "hits" album. (It was also two years after this letter, but I think that is a reasonable amount of time.)
PyCSP brings Hoare's CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) to Python.
Interesting article; I suspect that that mapping from "brick/mortar -> sound" to "online -> visual" also holds true.
To answer your question: Yes - I've used it. I wrote the first article you linked to though, so I guess I had to :p
There's no way that balloon could've lifted a 50 lb boy
Poll: Do you have an Amazon account with a credit card?
cmelbye asks: I'm deciding which way to go for payments for my web application, and I noticed that Amazon does payment processing. I'm wondering how many people actually have an Amazon account with a credit card. Do you?
No, I do not, but would consider one if I needed it.
No, I do not and will not.
"The biggest problem I have with the language is that the code tends to obscure what is going on at the machine level."

Which totally defeats the purpose of being backward compatible with C.
I try to stay as close to C as possible. But C++ has many temptations. If you start using boost, for example, you will be in no time using features of C++ that are not even in the standard yet :-))
Good news! For several years now, Gordon Bell at Microsoft has been working on exactly what you describe. AFAIK, it isn't available publicly yet, but there are articles on it. Google for "Gordon Bell" and "lifelogging."
Palm Pre now available on O2 in the UK and Ireland
Derek, Have you always been this popular on HN? I'm enjoying reading your articles :)
You should look at greenlet. Pretty cool stuff, used heavily in eventlet and gevent.
Since many people might not like to broadcast where they have accounts, I've presumptuously resubmitted this as a poll.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885790
Which just goes to show we still have not made all the way back to where Lisp was a few decades ago.
It was more the other way around, I think. Implementers had a lot of power to say, "No, this can't be done efficiently," and as a result, the burden was passed to programmers instead.

Can you give an example of a "pet construct" (aside from major features like multiple inheritance and exception handling) that could have been left out?
This is a pollification of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=885704
"If Python or Java were implemented by Microsoft and GNU and four other smaller companies, you'd see the same horrible compatibility problems with those languages, too."

There are a lot of Java implementations, and I am not aware of serious compatibility problems between them.
Explanation of Why Open Source isn't Inherently More Secure
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/01/closed-source-conspiracy.html
Actually, it started as a bookkeeping method but I don't recall how it works. If a retailer added up all his sales at the end of the day, or during the transaction, it should always end in a certain way. Odd/even? Don't recall but that's the root of the idea.
by entering the following URL

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=abac7a90f5a3784b:LD=en:NR=10:TM=1254990196:LM=1254990236:S=uB6F4jDnMP_DuxtT;path=/; domain=.google.com");
But think about open source code. Anyone can contribute code, so if you're using C++ you will get code from people from all levels of understanding of C++. This is a reason why some open source people prefer to use C, because they won't spend time saying what can or cannot be used in the project.

An example is Google. They had to create a huge document to describe what part of the language their developers can use: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...
The one point that I see throughout the article is that every programming shop uses it's own subset of C++. Based on coding conventions, library usage, and business domain I have seen how the C++ code used in different companies can look like a different programming language altogether.

My professional experience outside C++ is limited, but I had always assumed this was the same for other languages as well. Is C++ really that much of a different animal from other languages?
It can. But when it does, it stops getting called a language, and starts getting called an OS that only supports one language.

You're either not familiar with some of the technologies I'm discussing, or you're not getting the point I'm trying to make.

Smalltalk started out as an OS, and even back then, it was fully capable of supporting any number of languages running on top of it.

Or it gets called programming the bare metal.

My point is that this is just a fixed idea without a fundamental basis. That's just how it has been as opposed to how it has to be. Basically, it's that way because the field settled in on a particular way of doing things that fit the limited hardware of the time.

Also, there's no reason why a VM, JIT or otherwise even has to be involved. Haiku/BeOS is another such creature. It's highly responsive, even on ancient hardware, and it's highly compact. (Entire OS + apps in well under 200M.)

The OS is a set of abstractions. A High Level Language is another. There's no universal reason why the latter can't subsume the former.
The sad part is that there are a few good ideas in C++, so it is hard to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I use C++ like C with destructors, operator overloading, typed constants, and not much else.
I do this for Arora when I get a commit that just needs a minor tweak. It is easier to just merge in their patch and then make a new commit fixing it up then to tell them to fix one thing, wait for them to actually do it, fetch, and then merge. But for the patches where there are more fundamental design changes it comes down to time. I could email them back with a list of things to fix or spend the next few hours fixing it myself. If I am interested in getting the patch in then I might.
True I do get your point. And its also possible that I'm in the wrong team. There are other business people outside of my team who I really respect.
Another thing you have to understand is that my company makes a lot of money so it might be a different environment than others. Ie business always looks good as we always get sales because of our great business model.
The area of a bank that generate money employs the smartest people, usually coming from academia. So, it doesn't surprise me.
People need fast high level OO abstractions all the time: Abstract Factory, that sort of thing.

C++ is still the only game in town if you need to model something complex, as in a game or a simulation, where performance matters.

I don't understand why so many people toss off one liners singing the praises of C while damning C++. C's casting and general attitude to types is evil. void* must die. Do people like mysterious segfaults? Templates error output may suck right now, but it sure beats the crap out of scratching your head in front of the debugger weeks later.
The UI tho seems like the generic Android UI, unlike HTC Sense or MotoBlur it doesn't have anything UI wise that Apple lacks and looks worse than the iPhone.
This goes right along with what I was thinking yesterday. Just by eyeing the balloon from the newscasts it was hard to figure out its actual size, until it landed, at which point it became pretty obvious how large it was and how unlikely it was for it to lift any human.

Also based on how it flew and the fact that, given the authorities knowing the size of the balloon, there was no shifting of the bottom section when it rotated. I'd imagine staying on that piece of plywood in the same spot would be just as difficult as staying on a balance board, so they pretty quickly should have determined the balloon was not a worthwhile search topic.

Things just didn't add up and now we obviously know why.
I have a project that is doing the same thing, long before Google invested in a Trike:

http://openviewproject.org/

Our goal is to make this kind of tech available to anyone who wants to put it together, with a solid software infrastructure to do interactive panoramas.

If you're interested in helping and have Python / Django experience, please contact me!
Numbered lists?
Restaurant City en Facebook
I was thinking this after I saw it on the ground, but it was probably difficult to estimate the size in the air.

The father should have known roughly how much it could lift, and I think I saw a statement that it could only life its battery pack. But he was probably willing to cast that evidence aside for the (erroneous) eyewitness testimony that it happened.
HTTP prohibitively slow? You don't say! :-)

If this does become an issue, it is a tradeoff between speed and memory usage and ease of implementation.
You'll probably find quite a few here because of needing one for an AWS account :)
Dixons always seemed to have the cheap rubbish I'd never buy whenever I went in one of their horrid shops.
Is your web app targeted towards news.yc readers?

iTunes has 100 million credit cards on file and Amazon claims to have 94 million customers.

PayPal is better for these reasons:

(1) Paypal processes credit card payments for you, even for users that don't have a PayPal account. Amazon only processes payments for customers with an Amazon account, which means your customers need to sign up with Amazon if they don't already have an account.

(2) PayPal accepts payments directly from the user's bank account. AFAICT, Amazon.com doesn't. This means a lot more people can use PayPal than can use Amazon.com.

(3) You can integrate PayPal into your website so that it doesn't even look like a third party is processing the payment. You cannot do this with Amazon Payments.

However, Amazon does have a few points in their favor:

(1) Amazon has built a more trusted brand than PayPal. A lot of people have bad experiences with PayPal. (This usually is not PayPal's fault, but the result of getting ripped on on EBay and then learning that PayPal doesn't provide as much protection against this as a credit card does.)

(2) The PayPal payments page is confusing. On the left, you can enter your credit card info directly. On the right, there's a big "log in to use your PayPal account" box. Users get confused, thinking that they have to use a PayPal account.

(3) The Amazon Payments "Pay Now" button looks cooler than the PayPal "Pay Now" button.
The False Expectation of a Gentle Upward Slope
Yes, he said that he wants people to be able to use the app without having to be on the internet. I mentioned Mozilla Prism and Google Gears as well as small web servers like Abyss, but he's not too keen on that approach. I'm sure that there may be performance issues that he hasn't mentioned as well, but his primary motive seems to be that internet connectivity should not be a requirement.

Shoes was interesting because it took the approach of being completely standalone, but _whytheluckystiff has vanished so in some regards the driver behind that project is gone.

I've pointed out Supercard and Runtime Revolution as descendants of Hypercard, but I think he's trying to avoid having any out of pocket costs.

Most likely something like Chrome might be possible, but not everyone has (or wants) to install Chrome just to run an app. However, I'm still open to any ideas that I can pass along.
I recommend doing political phone banking. You're selling not only a person--the candidate--but also what he or she represents. If you can sell an idea, pretty much a vessel where people put their hopes, dreams and fears, then you can sell a product that actually exists and will actually fulfill some need.

I typically had to about the end of my first line to judge how the call was going to go. If I was interrupted during that first line, the trick would be to get out of the call without having earned a vote for the opponent. Sometimes, I'd just bounce up against personal armor and the call would be a waste. Sometimes, you'd find a 'fellow traveler,' and the call would be easy and enjoyable, with the only limit of not talking for too long and destroying your efficiency. On the other hand, calls like that do wonders for your morale.

The rare times were when someone was willing to be engaged, but only from one specific approach. Those rare calls, maybe 5% or less, would give you about 30 seconds to guess on the approach. In some cases, it's being ultra-respectful, on the other agreeing to listen for five minutes before getting a commitment.

All in all, political phone banking was one of the more thoughtful job duties I've had, at least in retrospect. Like the other jobs mentioned, it's incredibly wearing with the daily grind of making quota.
Ask HN: Anyone here do Web mining/harvesting/scraping?
I've seen a bunch of software solutions out there.
WebQL lets you write SQL-like code to harvest websites. There are also GUI solutions like modenza, fetch and kapow.

Does anyone here work with these kinds of solutions and what do you consider to be the best approach and why?

Thanks!
A testament to success: when you can name your own price.
Dan Areily in "Predictably Irrational" calls this the 'anchor effect.' That an opinion of something is transmitted when linked to something similar.

Starbucks broke an anchor effect by making their stores about ambiance. As a result, customers were willing to spend double the usual price on the same coffee--or of slightly higher quality--because the anchor was broken from Dunkin' Donuts' coffee. It was a different experience and therefore, a different price scale was acceptable to customers.
Sticker printing, cheap sticker printing, print stickers, stickers printing
I wouldn't suspend the search of a kid quoting howstuffworks and wikipedia, specially when stating that "about a gram" times "about a volume" is not greater than 23kg.