skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My emacs setup consists of several files, a structure that I shamelessly copied from one and only Stevey Yegge, a true emacs fanatic.

Now, I used to work for Google and most people there let you see their own home directories and I used that as an opportunity to learn from Stevey's setup.

There are a lot of customization going on and I should do a separate blog post about the setup. Here are I just cherry-picked some recent configuration favorites of mine:

;;
;; Superb way to move between Emacs windows
;; Shift+arrow keys
(windmove-default-keybindings)

;; Resize emacs according to the display resoluton
(defun set-frame-size-according-to-resolution ()
(interactive)
(if window-system
(progn
(if (> (x-display-pixel-width) 1900)
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist (cons 'width 260))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist (cons 'width 80)))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
(cons 'height (/ (- (x-display-pixel-height) 50) (frame-char-height))))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
(cons 'top 10))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
(cons 'left 5)))))
It is good, especially with rails.vim and NERDtree installed. fuzzy_file_finder is super useful as well, can't recommend it enough.
Twitter Labs on the Way
If it's so great, why do you even have to market it?

That's kinda silly. That's like saying "why does Apple spend jillions of dollars marketing the iPhone if it's so great?" Some people genuinely don't know about [pick your editor], and some people like their tools so much, they like to tell you about them. Isn't that the whole point of blogs, anyway?
MIT Handyboard is a much more powerful platform for hobbyist robotics. Check out the light seeking robot I built:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaeWc4RPhok
Sorry if this is obvious, dusting off the math mind here... How is this solved without brute force computation?
Who knows what kinds of selective pressure this section of the genome has been exposed to?

Probably none. You would be hard pressed to conjure up a reason to explain why a sequence that codes for a non-functional protein would be functionally conserved for 7 million years. (You could win a Nobel prize for such a revolutionary contribution.)

I work in drug design. Let me assure you that even a single mutation can render the structure of a protein completely inert.
Theres a bunch of MSR funded university research projects which have been ongoing for a good many years now, eg http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/SenseCam/
It's slick to be sure. However, what I keep asking myself is this: what problem does it solve?

If it's not obvious to you what problem it solves, then you've spent too long away from corporate environments with their massive, unwieldy threads of emails flying about, full mailboxes, and other email issues.

The problem that Wave solves is blindingly obvious to anyone who uses email as a primary tool to work with teams. Whether it's the right solution is another question altogether, but the problem is definitely there.
Macs' low popularity keeps them safer from hacking and malware
Fake Steve Jobs: What My Apple Tablet Means For News
I think it means that there is a lot of stuff you need to learn all at once, upfront, before you can really use vi effectively. It's in contrast to being able to just learn a few basics and pick it up gradually. The steepness of the learning curve doesn't have anything to do with how long it takes overall.
Why don't Macs support multiple monitors?
Purgecolon.net - Directory
It's neither obvious nor easy. It was an outstanding problem in the mid 1700's, and it was Euler that solved it but some superbly reckless arguments.

Euler's original paper:

http://www.17centurymaths.com/contents/euler/e041tr.pdf

The bottom of this page has a more modern treatment, although it takes a lot for granted:

http://www.math.wpi.edu/IQP/BVCalcHist/calc3.html

Another treatment of Euler's proof is here:

http://library.thinkquest.org/28049/Summing%20reciprocals.ht...
Even if you hire IT staff, how much of it is really under your own control? Do you really control your IT staff more than you control an outsourcing firm?
Proving a Computer Program's Correctness
Good lord!

The main reason to learn vi is that it is installed by default on so many systems, including most ancient Unixes.

When your task is to edit a config file and you don't have time/permissions to install your editor of preference.... vi is the only choice.

Emacs and others may not be present on a system when you really need it.

A basic competence in vi is essential if you're going to deal with Unix. Even if you prefer Emacs (like me) or other myriad tools.
I'd say yes. They have a direct stake in the well being of the company. A free or nearly free email service provider does not.

You can't outsource responsibility.

People working for you have a contract with you, and a detailed list of their responsibilities.

I'd trust them a lot more than some large company providing a similar service for free or a really small fee. The incentives are completely different as is the relationship.
IBM "wishes" it undercut Google with discount e-mail service
It's not me - I live at http://www.penzba.co.uk/my_house_number.png
It's just intentional obfuscation. Just like the double inversion.
Neat! Reminds me of the 'elektor' turtle from the 80's, did much the same thing with a bunch of opamps.

It also was clever enough to find a place to recharge iirc.

There was another one in one of the early 'byte' issues.
i, too, am a very happy long time (13+ years) vi/vim user. if you haven't ever used a powerful keyboard-only text editor such as vim or emacs, you simply have no idea what you've been missing.

quit being a curmudgeon. this is one happy human sharing something they love with others. if you don't want any of it, just keep moving. your negativity does not advance the human condition.
The hell of Apple video connectors
Why there are no patents in Hollywood?
Eclim. Bringing Eclipse functionality to the Vim editor.
Adding in Facebook is probably next. Though, I think it will take a little while for us to really iron out the kinks with campaigns on Twitter. Thanks for the feedback!
Perhaps. I don't know what other editor you use, but if you use Unix with any regularity, I'd recommend learning either Emacs or vi.

I use both, but tend to use them in different situations. Major, multi-file editing in Emacs, but quick edits or work on other computers in vi.

More comparison: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990
I'm not sure what you mean by the double inversion. You inverting a sum of invertions - that can't be undone in any sensible way. Can you explain a little more what you mean?
Def agree that Java is less readable, and there will always be shorter ways of expressing things (such as a for-loop). But I do think an IDE does, and could do a lot more to help: hide the generated boiler-plate code from me, show me a visual map of the source structure so I can jump to places quickly, and perhaps even summarize certain code blocks for readability (eg why not summarize a standard MAP for-loop, so that it becomes editable if I click on the summary?)

There are many other things that an IDE could do beyond validating my code, function arguments, giving me hints, auto-completing variable names, code-blocks, etc. All those things make Java & C# much more productive than people think. The worst bit is actually dealing with libraries, whereas with Python/PHP much more stuff is built-in.
Yes, however aren't we all (at least those of us on this board) looking for the personality type that can specifically do just that?
Thanks! I've been wanting to do a video demo. That's probably one of the upcoming changes to the site. I agree that the 'learn more' page is probably too wordy as well. Hoped that the bullet points would help clearly define what the service does..but will add more clarity on the home page.
I agree with the other poster regarding "enterprise culture". Also, boilerplate code is not risky code and doesn't take a lot of time to generate.
Last link needs to swap %20 for the space.
Wow, that's bad! Thanks for the feedback. I was pretty focused on making the home page short and to the point. Guess it could use a bit of rework though. Good comments. :)
ido.el to find files

(require 'ido)
(ido-mode t)
Sometimes, if you're really screwed, you may not be able to mount the partition with vi. ed is almost always on Unix, though. (Knowing how to open a file, find and change a few lines, and resave is probably good enough for emergency situations.)

Also, it's worth learning ed because the ex prompt in vim shares most of its functionality, and because sooner or later you'll realize how lucky you are that you don't have to work on a teletype. :)
Site optimization took a back seat so we could launch it early. I'm generally a stickler about sprites and whatnot - none of which are used on the site. JS and css is combo'ed and minified but that's all.

optipng would be an easy fix though and will try to do that for the next release.

Thanks for the feedback.
In theory, why can't it read the for-loop for you? Why not summarize the above as eg:

List<String> userNames = users[@name]

Just showing the line in a different colour could mean it's "summarized". Clicking on it could reveal the complete loop and allow you to modify it. But common idioms such as map/find/reduce/each can be summarized.
Look, it's really not that tough. Here's what you need to treat vim as a text editor with syntax highlighting:

esc (escape) = go to the default mode
i (insert) = when you want to make changes to the document

esc + : (escape, colon) = think of this as control + whatever
:w = (w)rite - save your file
:q = (q)uit - quit vim
:wq = (w)rite, then (q)uit
:q! = (q)uit!, discarding any changes

Just those few things will let you use vim well enough while you're figuring out all the really cool stuff it can do.

Emacs can be treated similiarly:
C = control
M = "meta", usually the alt or option key. You can use escape if you want.

C-x C-f = control x (do something) + control f (find file) - open a file
C-x C-s = save a file
C-x C-c = quit
C-k = (k)ill - this is similar to cut
C-y = yank - this is similar to paste

For emacs, it may be easier to start with cua mode -

M-x cua-mode
(btw, m-x means "run this function")

Cua mode gives you a copy, cut and paste that works the same as your operating system.
So

"I have always insisted that our children run a Linux distribution on their laptops just to minimize the impact (on us to cleaning up) of automatically downloaded and installed viruses and trojans"

and

"running a Linux-derived operating system will indeed protect many users from the automatic installation of many OS-specific (read: Windows) targeted viruses and worms"

But Linux is not the answer to security problems? Oh I see what you've done there, it's not THE single and only answer to every security issue. Maybe the author should have used that as the headline and given fair warning that nobody needed to read it because it's only stating the obvious.
One issue with the public timeline is that you can't really get metrics for which follower did what. When sending a DM campaign you can see which follower referred the most clicks.

That being said, you can send it to your public timeline or to a group of followers. It's up to the company to decide which one works better and that's part of what the analytics are for.

The target company is one who has special promotions and giveaways and has followers who value their offers.
On Facebook, press ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A ↵ and scroll with mouse
Yes, this stuff is hard. My doctoral thesis was about using formal methods to prove that a system met a security policy. Specifically, I developed an algebra for reasoning about a system and creating its code directly from a specification.

If that sort of stuff excites you it's here: http://www.jgc.org/blog/jgc-thesis.pdf
I guess it's really a matter of tastes indeed. My point is that, no matter the fact that I can try to mimic the Python idiomatic way or the reverse, there is a real difference between this languages, and is a difference that I see in many other languages, splitting them into two families: the "tools" languages that try to provide already build abstractions able to solve common problems, and the "concepts" languages where there are just a few rules you can combine to solve problems. I love the latter approach.
We use OAuth to link Twitter accounts. Our OAuth implementation was done before Twitter added "login with Twitter".

OpenID isn't yet widely adopted (not enough for us to really support it --- chicken and egg anyone?).

I do like the simplicity of 'login with Twitter' but haven't seen any evidence yet that our sign up page has many bounces.

We have 96% of users that link at least one Twitter account to their PubliciTweet account. Which was quite a surprise to us.
Long domain, short content. Any reasons why not to use Twitter for marketing?
Puppy eyes

please?

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01NMOoXzYag23nmWebENGPMQ==...
Elephants Don't Play Chess (Rodney Brooks, 1990)
You're replying to the wrong person - vim is my primary editor. I'm ranting about the stupidity of the phrase "Steep learning curve."
Indeed. And proud of it.
There are two plugins which have helped me enormously when dealing with large projects: bufexplorer and nerdtree. Check them out, seriously.
IT expert forged railway tickets
MUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING FOR REAL MEN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yH_j8-VVLo
What's the deal with so many people hating DMs on Twitter? We provide the option to send DMs to groups of followers. Our hope is that Twitter will end up being a place where companies that provide valuable content (via DM or otherwise) have lots of followers and ones which don't...do not. No harm done if a spammer with few followers sends mass DMs. It really comes back to inflating follower #s which needs to go away if Twitter is to become a true tool for communication.

The bottom line is that you have the option of not following people you feel send you unwanted messages.

Let me know if I'm way off base or missing something here.

Thanks for the feedback though.
Deciding to get off your butt is the hard part...until you do. Then it's the easy part. Anyone can decide.

Now getting something done - that's really the hard part. OP is right on: pick something small and get started. You don't have to quit your job.

And here's the tricky part: You have to get something done every day. Something, anything. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be something. Get one little thing working each night after work and save the bigger stuff for the weekends.

When you cross something off you list every day, it feels empowering. And you see real progress.

OTOH, if you don't do this, before you know it 2 weeks will have gone by with nothing changed and a million good excuses. They one day you'll wonder, "What ever happened to that great idea I had on the way to work?"
I got my invite, but with no one I know also having an account, I don't really have anything to do with it. So it will probably be ignored until I'm able to toss out invites.
MIT's not a meritocracy. Admissions already chooses who is the best candidate, so this is just an extension. It also lets MIT control the quality of their posts somewhat.

On a whim I checked out their blogs and compared them to my college's blogs. They've got few fewer smiley faces, and come across as more mature. I think that for MIT that's a good thing, since that's their reputation. I wonder, though, if for other colleges allowing a bit more freedom humanizes them somewhat.
Nothing happens for me
With 3 partners, the typical nightmare scenario is that one partner is marginalized or kicked out by the 2 others. I've seen that happen and it's ugly.
This is an interesting article. I find myself disagreeing with the decisions of my coworkers and supervisors frequently, and I argue my position, we come to a conclusion, and that's the end. I don't take the fact that someone disagreed with me personally, but I am always nervous that other people will.
I'll sadly admit that for most quick file editing I still use pico/nano (which is installed on most every system that I've touched in the past 3-5 years). I used emacs around 1998, but at the time it was too big I felt and had too much power. vi was just damn confusing. When I saw people using it, it looked amazing, but I could just never get the handle on it.

When I'm editing big files/coding I use Cyberduck to SSH/SCP files over to TextMate, which works well most of the time. The only time it doesn't work is when I need to sudo edit that file, because Cyberduck can't sudo.
It doesn't really solve this problem when corporations don't want to trust their data to google. It's well known that gmail doesn't comply with HIPAA/SOX and doesn't offer any kind of guarantee on data when corporations use it, this is a huge issue for adoption in the workplace by many corporations.

I could be missing something though, is Wave something you can install locally and have control over? It's not Google's style so I'd guess not.

If I'm mistaken, I'm more than willing to be enlightened.
It is pretty bad, there's only a theoretical cream that may be in use some day, many years from now and it may reduce infection rates.

If you take the article at face value, we just cured HIV. And IMHO articles like that are VERY bad because over the years they have built a consensus of science is wrong and confusing and disappointing into the general public.

Anything that's repeatedly over hyped will end up like that.
Clay Shirky: Rescuing The Reporters
Why have you recommended only firefox instead of old browsers, and not chrome as well?
Would a good Pseudo-Random number generator satisfy your definition?

(By the way, humans, when asked directly for random numbers, are terrible at the task.)
Just the other day I came across some kind of article that included a bit on a wireless computer to monitor link, let me go dig and see if I can find it.

edit: found it:

http://gigaom.com/2008/02/27/too-many-signals-delivering-wir...

It's a 2008 article, you'd expect some movement since then.

edit2: more info:

http://www.wirelesshd.org/
Err yea, but didn't most people have mixed feelings on the iPod, gmail, Twitter, etc too?

As a geek, I'm mainly interested in the API, not myself using it immediately. That will come around surely, but the API is what I really want to sink my teeth into.
I see it something like: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot[%28Sqrt[Pi]+Erf[3x...]. At first, you can use it and get something done, but it isn't useful. As you learn more, it becomes slightly more useful, but not much, until it hits a point where you finally understand the interface, and can use the features to their complete intent.

Having thought this through a little more, it seems more like bumps. For example, you can't do anything with Vim until you learn basic motion and insertion. That a bump. Then, you learn how to use the more complex motions, and get another bump. With something that has a steep learning curve it is done in bumps, rather than being smooth, because partial knowledge doesn't help any. If you think about it, if you only know the j and r commands in vim, you're not going to be doing anything at all, you're going to need to know at least hjkli before you can even use it.
What if society realigned the meaning of "free?" Some big box store might announce that something is "free at any one of our stores." "Free" can be a big draw. A lot of people will go to get the "free" item. However, to get this "free" item, they have travel to get it. In the US this probably means burning some petroleum in their car, but when gasoline is cheap enough, most people in the US don't think too much about having to get in the car. In times like that, being able to drive somewhere and pick something up without paying is effectively "free." For most people, "Free Software" works somewhat like this. It's "free" and they really don't think of what they pay for network access.

Micro-payments could work like this. If user expectations could be aligned that way, "free" could mean only for the cost of the download. (If you dig enough, for most people "free" just means: please don't make me pay more than $35 a month for doing everything I do on the Internet.)

In other words, it's all in our minds. It's all just how we think of it. Markets are a great way to regulate something ubiquitous. We'd probably benefit from market forces being brought to bear on the Internet in a more direct way.

For one thing, it would make the ad-blocking debate moot. Ads are just a very indirect form of micropayment.
Cloudera simplifies Hadoop with easy-to-use GUI
263 CSS properties
Standard and browser specific CSS properties. Examples, browser support, description.
Top posting.

What's the most annoying thing on the internet?
Ottoman - lightweight, reliable multi-version key-value store
"Maybe if I make my title sensational enough, people will actually read my stupid blog post about a nitpick that most other people would probably consider to be a good design choice."
heh, I guess I misread what it was you were ranting about; I took it to mean that you hate any sort of learning curve when it comes to editors. Thanks for clarifying!
Looking at an ad is not the same as paying for something. It is not a productive action.

The market doesn't perfectly distinguish this. If someone if willing to pay for your looking at an ad, then it is productive according to the market. Hence, someone is paid. Does this reflect reality? Nothing is perfect, even markets.
BumpTop brings 'Minority Report style control' to PC
Today I learned that Vim began on the Amiga.

http://cd.textfiles.com/fredfish/v1.6/FF_Disks/571-600/FF_59...
Yes, it's an open protocol. http://www.waveprotocol.org/ It's still being revised and edited. There are example clients and servers based on the actual code Google is using. It would have taken you about 5 seconds to search for this, btw. :]
You sure it isn't B A [Enter]?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code
It works as a visitor filtering mechanism. "You must be at least this good at maths..."
You're doing it wrong...

There are a few options, but they are all along the lines of this:
http://www.amazon.com/Addlogix-MA-WL-DVGA-Wireless-Projector...
"But we're doing this functionally, so we need to walk over the entire board, apply the rules and return an entire board."

This is why I am still wary of adopting these languages with "fixed memory". Ok for a cellular automaton there happened to be a workaround, but in general, isn't all data connected somehow? So how does one handle that in a big system with lot's of data? I can not change ALL data in every iteration. (Specific example: suppose I want to write a multiplayer game server - for every move a player makes, I would have to replace ALL game objects, player object, and so on???).

I looked a bit into Erlang and it seems there could be a workaround by having lots of threads, so one only needs to change the dataset of one thread at a time. But how do Clojure or Haskell handle that kind of thing (I don't think they encourage thousands of threads as Erlang does?).

I think erlang also had a special kind of data structure that would also allow for kind of mutable data per thread, but really, it all sounded a bit messy to work with.

How does the paradigm hold up anyway? Isn't there one point eventually when the processes still interfere with each other? For example when accessing the database?
Great could you shoot me a link when its up? (email in profile).
Having gone through the roughest patch in my life in the last year, I experienced this. The one thing that killed my productivity more than anything else was a mixture of A) Feeling like work was meaningless and questioning why I worked so hard in the first place and B) Sleeping 3 hours a nigh at most mixed with only eating a few meals a week.

Mostly it just took time for me to get back on a semi-normal routine, meditation, exercise, nutrition and rest are really really key factors though.

I hope things get better for you soon.