skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You prefer web apps to desktop apps?
Python vs Clojure 2: Reloaded
Many Python users submitted better code than what was posted in the last article - This time I've dug up exemplary code from Rosetta.
As I said, whether or not God exists, the question remains whether or not the existence of God is _compatible_ with the existence of evil. That's what theologians actually discuss. Stating God's non-existence just doesn't address the question at issue.
Not a real client on the Mac. Just a Fluid-like (Fluid-based?) wrapper app. Don't know about the iPhone.

The real test of Wave's openness is going to be whether a client can realistically be built by a third party.

Right now some people on the semi-public Wave server are discussing defining the client/server protocol, claiming that Google is open to such a third-party definition. I'm very skeptical that Google is actually open to such an approach. It sounds more like rampant, uninformed speculation.

(What's running right now at Google is just the same Java-based, protobuf-based communications code on both the server and client, with a GWT version on the client.)
Gotta agree. I prefer Vista to XP. Maybe I'm in the minority, but since the latest service pack, it seems rock solid.

Of course, I also know how to remove malware or avoid it in the first place, and how to actually uninstall programs/clean the registry.
Kauffman Foundation Acquires StudentBusinesses.com
I'm making a vacation out of it: Wednesday through Monday, staying with friends in Berkley and Oakland. Planning on renting a bike, riding up into Marin, and tooling around on the old fire roads.

There's already a pre-event party on Friday night.
Since I know Lau reads comments here:

The way to advocacy is to start with an excellent example in language X and then tell us how it can be done better with an example in language Y.

Cherry-picking examples isn't going to win you many converts.
First, I agree with you on the Vista argument. I never upgraded to Vista because there are absolutely ZERO reasons why I need anything more than XP. Most of what I do is in the browser, and my apps are running fine. I have ZERO reasons to upgrade to 7 as well.

However, you lost me on the Blu Ray argument. If you have a 19" TV, no, you are not going to notice, or care, if you are watching a movie in HD or not. But on 50"+, it's so awful watching a regular DVD it completely ruins the experience.

So, back to your response, if you have a small PC with basic needs like coding, website updates, browsing the web, email, upgrading the OS is a waste of time and money. But, if you have a big PC and big needs from your apps, you may have a reason to upgrade.
How is this different than using bit.ly?
I totally agree that providing good analytics tools vs. their affiliate link is not a bad business. If they make some people's life easier, that's just fine.

Really what bothers me is the lack of balance between their offer and what they get from it.

So, sure, maybe they start at the very minimal product and will improve on it. Until then, I'll be wary.
upvoted for making me laugh :)
They are providing you a service and 5% of app sales is nothing given that there are 10 more websites doing very similar stuff.
I'm in, though I'll be staying in palo alto.
Me neither. There won't be until Mac developers get to grips with GCD. Then there will be some compelling reasons.
Twilight is that bad, apparently.
What to Expect: The Third Decade
Heh, well, I know your joking, but still, I guess they were apparently not into the stuff the guys were :)
To Dissect a Mockingbird:  A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus (1996)
1. Snow Leopard is faster than the previous OS version. Not something you see in the Microsoft universe.

2. Snow Leopard has added protection against hacks and bugs in e.g. Safari.

3. A lot of small UI nuisances have been fixed. See http://finerthingsinmac.com/
It simply feels more polished and well-designed.

So Snow Leopard is not a revolution with tons of checkbox features, but more like a tune-up for your car: it can still drive to/from work without, but it feels better when the motor runs smoothly.

Could we please stop this Apple users bashing: that Apple users are dimwits that only buys Macs due to the glimmer? It is so 90'ies.
A while back my wife bought a cheap Lenovo. They pre-installed a lot of crappy software and Vista. It ran painfully slow.

I formatted it and installed Ubuntu 9 and she's been computing happily ever since. Here's what she cares about:

1) Does it run relatively fast? Is it stable? Is there a noticeable delay because I am waiting for some unnecessary GUI special effects?

2) Does it run Firefox? Can I read reddit, watch videos on YouTube/Hulu, and check my email?
Parallelism and the Cloud
There is a value to having like minded people gather together without too many distractions. I've got nothing against soccer players, but I'd still prefer that Lisp NYC not be overrun by hordes of them.
Content-aware video editing in the temporal domain
If you are into mountain biking, there's a fun trail up in Fairfax (five minutes north of Golden Gate Bridge) called Tamarancho (approx. 11 miles). I'd be down for heading up there with a few people on Sunday if people are interested. There's a place to rent mountain bikes right at the base of the trail.
However, you lost me on the Blu Ray argument. If you have a 19" TV, no, you are not going to notice, or care, if you are watching a movie in HD or not. But on 50"+, it's so awful watching a regular DVD it completely ruins the experience.

I'm going to politely disagree. I have been lucky enough to be able to afford a pretty sweet home theater setup. The screen is ~8ft (I don't know the exact size, sorry) and while I might care about the difference between DVD and Blu Ray on it, most people really just don't.

Once the "omg that is cool!" affect wears off, people forget about it. They certainly don't care enough to spend the thousands of dollars it takes to upgrade their theater systems to it. I suspect that they also won't want to spend the hundreds of dollars to upgrade their computing equipment.
The majority of the value is in dealing with the i386 / x86_64 bifurcation of libraries, which is handled abysmally by the extant binary package management systems.
Even worse, it makes you look after two tries at it like you have an agenda to push.

I've flagged this because I thought the first time around that that was the case, now I'm sure.

Python and clojure both have their strengths, and their weaknesses.

Contrasting languages to show how one solves something vs how the other does it is education, keeping 'score' is a childish attempt at proving 'your' language to be the better one.

key quote: "But like I also told one disgruntled Scala user, it's not always fun being compared to Clojure and I think a few Python users felt that they got more competition than they hoped for."

And the picture at the end speaks volumes.

What I really don't get is if you're that much of a clojure fan why you don't get that these stupid articles are doing clojure more bad than good.

It reminds me of the damage done to Erlang by flooding HN with all those articles. If a language is good then there must be other ways of showing that.

Show me not how you implement some trivial benchmark in 16 vs 12 lines of code, show me how you made a serious production system capable of handling a couple of hundred thousand uniques in a real-world application.

And I'm sure that can be done, but that would be 'real work (tm)', whereas sniping is so much easier.

And for extra points, then find an expert programmer in the language that you wish to compare with and have them do the exact same thing.

That would impress me. This just annoys me.
Open Source Television
anything in the first few years of MS.

Altair.BASIC
MySpace plotting comeback as ”online hangout”
The sad thing I have seen many times is when people buy a new HDTV, but don't bother to buy a progressive upscaling DVD player. They watch their dvd's with their old dvd players that output ntsc resolution. DVD's already come in a resolution that is higher then their tv (720x480) so having a player that can upscale or even just send the 720x480 to their htdv rather than sending a downscaled ntsc signal will give them the "wow" they can show their friends without having to spend money on a BluRay player and disks.
10 years of Ximian
Yeah, this headline needs another hyphen: "Twitter-, blog-monitoring"
Writing a text editor is a relatively easy task and it's more a matter of user interface than of implementation.
Besides, I don't see why writing a mailer daemon is less important than, say, a text editor.
Open source identity: PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering
This is what I was trying to get at. I think there's a whole class of people out there who just like to build things.

Being king means responsibility and headaches. Being rich is nice but once you get past a certain point it all becomes abstract wealth as the author points out.

What's left after that? For a lot of the best engineers I know, reverting to '6 year old w/ big box of legos' mode and just building something to see how high you can go.
Could someone clarify this for me, please? On this page:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/intro-dns.html

under the "Multiple Servers" section, he says

"To protect against computer failure, there are actually several root servers, several .to servers, and two yp.to servers."

I don't understand, is he saying there are only two DNS servers in the world that you can contact to resolve yp.to?
DHT can certainly support range queries by broadcast and merge. The keyword in the context though is efficiently. Scalaris not a typical Dynamo like DHT. It's based on Chord, so it's possible support range scan with O(logn) metadata RPCs (n is number of nodes.) per query, which I wouldn't call efficient as these RPCs are expensive in that they not very cachable (nature of the DHT, unless the range query is exactly the same.) Typical Bigtable implementation can easily cache portion of metadata with clients and resulting 0 metadata RPC in many cases.
I would definitely be up for that
The history of scientific management
Sexist, homophobic. I'm surprised he didn't also include some comment on how "Adama's a spic when before he was white this is a catastrophy!". I'll take my captains latino, my fighter pilots chicks, and my immortal secret agents omnisexual, thanks.

Bigotted asshole.
How about shipping with llvm?
The "Big Idea" science fiction was never really about the technology. It's always been about the social implications and about exploring current situations but in a different way.

WTF, feminizing means nothing in that context.
The Art of Library
Honk if you love hacking! I know I do, and boy is it ever satisfying to turn a tough problem into a clever solution. But as you tumble down the slippery hacking slopes, picking up loose bits of code, you may find the itch to start writing code for other hackers. Good thought, but realize that implementation is just the tip of the iceberg.
Yes, that's true for most domains. All the other servers have to cache responses from those two servers. (For the record, the two yp.to servers are currently djb's machines dancer and forcewall.)
Imagining a World Without Annual Reviews
Ask HN: Best place to buy domains?
Hey guys, I'm looking for a place better than godaddy to buy a new domain. Preferably a place that has a lot of ccTLDs. Any advice?
Um, where did webwright bash Apple users?
Hi,

I just signed up for the single purpose of posting this, since quite a few Python users felt that the examples in the last post were poor - This time I've selected prime examples from Rosetta and despite jacques comment, the point wasn't to make Python look bad - it was exactly the opposite.

Lau out, hope you take something away from it.
Was there ever an application released that took advantage of Vista and didn't run on XP? On the Mac side, there are a fair number of programs that needed 10.5.
I had extremely bad arm and wrist pain back in the late 1990s. I started using a touchpad with my toe because a mouse was too painful. I even dabbled with voice recognition software for programming (pretty inefficient, as you might imagine).

What finally cured me was a physical therapy book called "Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain by Pete Egoscue" (http://amzn.com/0553379887).

This book completely changed my life. The exercise can seem a bit odd, but they worked amazingly well for me. I was almost completely back to normal within a month.
yeah i was thinking that too (that wave could be getting some of the servers)
Are you sure he wrote all of it in C? He often talks about higher-level languages he's written.
It's hard to claim I'm new to programming. I did it for over a decade and then retired from it. Perhaps it's just nostalgia, then.
Facebook’s VP of Engineering Michael Schröpfer
In the current system, that taste is often lifeguarding or serving cheese fries. Especially for first and second year students, many will be better off if they keep taking classes until they have the skills to get a job/internship that's more worthwhile.
Can I promise you that there's no codegen in it? No. Would I bet real money that there's no codegen in it? Yes.
In a sentence, the OP is nuts.

The traits that it notes as the hallmark of feminine writing are really the signs of SF's maturation as a real literary form. The old days of pulp and space operas were, as noted, generally male-centered. They were almost entirely plot-driven, with tissue-thin characters.

Today's SF is a legitimate vehicle for the exploration not only of new worlds, but of philosophy and the human condition. This isn't because of females, but because the genre as a whole -- coming from writers of both genders -- have learned how to really create characters, and that lets us really explore their humanity.

For example, Orson Scott Card's second series of Ender novels all retell the same story, just from the perspective of different characters (male and female). What could emphasize characters and their relationships more, and de-emphasize the plot itself, than this? (and yes, Card is male). Indeed, it seems to me that most of the SF I've read recently is like this to some extent, like the work of Robert Charles Wilson.

To the extent that being able to address the hard questions is a good thing (and I think it is), this is very good for science fiction.

And BTW, Frankenstein is not horror, it's proper science fiction. Its theme deals with man's apparent mastery of nature, and how that becomes his folly. (More properly, horror should be considered a sub-genre of fantasy.)

And conversely, The Hobbit and Conan are not science fiction, they are fantasy, in that they deal with man (or halfling, I suppose) at the mercy of forces beyond his comprehension, trying to make sense of those forces. Indeed, Tolkein's work is THE canonical fantasy.
Thanks!

It does appear to be back up, now.
Mags on a Plane - Fuel your Magazine Inspiration for the Next Months
Yeah, people just don't care. That's the thing now. They're scared of new stuff and if the old stuff still works, even if it's slow/crappy/whatever, they'll fight tooth and nail to keep everything exactly the same.

Maybe it's a problem or maybe it's not, I don't know.
Erlang’s sweet spot
jacques, calm down, please.

This is a fun comparison showing off some features of both languages. Notice in example 2 where Python is actually the most concise, cleanly written example where my code comes out looking a bit cramped? It's not a hatchet job, it's a comparison which will tell you something about both languages.

Sure I like the real world examples too, but for a simple outline of a few of their respective qualities this should tell you enough. If you have a larger project you'd want to tag-team on, showing the capabilities of both languages on a much larger scale I'm definitely up for it, that would also be educational.
What would happen if he suddenly decided to unplug dancer and forcewall forever, would all the other DNS servers in the world fail to resolve yp.to after their cached responses expire?
icey - I'm not trying to win any converts, simply display some qualities of both languages.
Ask HN: Are you looking to join a saas startup?
Hi, I'm looking for a cofounder for my saas startup. The startup focuses on helping teams communicate better. I'm looking for someone that has good design or technical skills. I'm open for suggestions.

My idea is a twitter for your business. So, you'd go to the site, register your account for your business and boom you could have your own twitter for your business/organization.

And of course your company would have the option to take it one step further, to have a premium account, regarding functionality. You could basically have features such as todos(for example, you'd assign a todo to me like this: @todo for emil hajric: please fix something on #projectxyz) and various features like uploading files and posting them inside your "tweet/status update."
I'm flying out Sunday, but if anyone wants to meet up Friday night I'd be down. I'm staying in Sunnyvale, but plan on being in San Francisco for most of the day Friday.
This was the state of the AppStore over a year ago and I've continued to hear the same story from various sources month over month. It's not really a surprise anymore, so it begs the question of whether or not they did research. They should complete this blog post and make it a Top 10 Reasons Why Not To Develop for the AppStore. The four bullet points are scratching the surface of many issues that compound into a one big frustration.

The thing is, there is also a list of the Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Develop for the AppStore. That list forces you to swallow the crap you have to put up with well, because Apple has cured so many of the much bigger headaches.
Oh, come on. Are people really taking this article seriously? Look, it would be interesting to read an academic analysis of possible differences in how the sexes both produce and perceive entertainment. That is not what this article is. It is about pushing a gender war, where men are battling against a female gay alliance for control of the media.

From the article:
Men, young and old, find gays and bisexuality (among men at least) about as attractive as a “fabulous” Broadway show followed by a viewing of all three of the “High School the Musical” movies. In fact, the more “gay” Broadway has become, (and the more technically excellent), the more repellent it has become to men and boys. Indeed, metal and rap’s popularity stem from the hostility both have to gays, making male sexuality not “questionable” the way the love for Broadway showtunes would be.Women generally like gays, and find gay sex fascinating the way men do lesbian sex. However, men know well that most young women, if presented a magic button that would make most men (average joes) “gay” they’d break their fingers pushing it. The chief objective of attractive young women being turning off male desire of all but the most Alpha of men.

This is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author misrepresents men who like musicals, gay men, rap music, and women all in one paragraph. The article he is responding to, "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky" is just as bad.

As a final note, some of the recent television shows the author uses to support his conclusion that women are ruining science fiction are "Battlestar Galactica", the new "Dr. Who", "Buffy", and "Firefly". It has not been my experience that any of these shows have succeeded in repulsing a male audience, although perhaps that's just my group of friends.
Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock?
I'm actually not crazy about alphabetizing properties, though it doesn't strike me as a terrible idea. I generally prefer to group the properties by function - i.e., the block properties together, text-formatting properties together, etc.
You mean like dnssec support? Yes, apart from that one super important feature, you may be correct.

And I bet the operators of ten of the thirteen root nameservers who are running BIND will be mighty glad to hear from you!
Explaining Déjà Vu
Don’t just try to steal a share of the existing market, create a new one
Data Portability and Lies, Damned Lies
I don't think there's an "inactivity plug". When the announcement about Geocities being taken down came along I went and hunted out my old site and found it still going; it must have been a few years since I'd touched it and it was getting only a handful of hits (plus it was META-REFRESH redirected). The wayback machine never really went after the content of Geocities and the like, certainly it never had my stuff, presumably it was generally not worth keeping.
This is part I in a multi-part series. Mike is a good guys. It was great conversation especially on some of the haystack work to how they are hiring.

Other parts coming soon
FB Engineering vision
Haystack project
Hiring integreted engineering disciplines
FB as an OS
Open source role within FB
How to get more out of Memcache and MySql
His vision of cloud computing
How involved is Mark Zuckerberg in engineering
FB buying spree how do you integrate companies
Lessons shared from his work at Mozilla and FB
DNSSEC is a disaster. Even if you liked the protocol today, having support for it in your DNS server wouldn't help you.

It's true though; thirteen root nameserver operators do run BIND. You know what's worse? The tens of millions of people that like The Black Eyed Peas. >shudder< - what's wrong with me?
The Spearhead is one of those bonkers "PUA" sites. Ironically in The Game they go out wearing feather boas...

None of my male friends like the new Dr Who, but that's 'cos we're all old geezers who grew up in the days when Dr Who, you know, actually visited alien planets and travelled through time and stuff, instead of just hanging around on a housing estate in Wales trying to get laid. It's like Eastenders now.
"However, with an estimated 330 million internet users as of January 2009, it has been announced that Vista usage had surpassed Microsoft’s pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users.".

The question isn't why hasn't Vista sold well, it's why do people think it hasn't sold well?
But people have never really cared. And they've always been scared of change.

XP had the same 'why upgrade?' problem as Vista when it showed up; despite following on the heels of the ME train wreck. People were still largely satisfied with 98SE and didn't see a compelling reason to upgrade.

But eventually they did buy newer, faster hardware and peripherals. Microsoft wisely never patched improved USB and WiFi support into 98, so people learned to tolerate XP.

The biggest difference now, is that there isn't a very compelling argument for new hardware either. Particularly amidst the Current Economic Conditions.
I am intrigued by one point - Tornado doesn't work on Windows, and Magnum specifically cites Linux as a requirement. What is it about these servers that makes them unfeasible or just currently unworkable in CPython in Windows?
Also, Nintendo (or the reseller) doesn't charge your card until it ships.
In Vista and Win7 if the video driver crashes the OS can recover, instead of lost work and frustration as your computer reboots you get a little pop-up in the system tray. Yet few users appreciate this because MS is bad at marketing this sort of thing.

i'm not sure how you would market this to the non-geek audience without it sounding something like this... now when windows crashes you won't lose work.
Apple OS upgrades have also been generally priced much more reasonably than Microsoft's.

If Vista had been a $29 upgrade instead of a $299 upgrade, I think it might have had a lot more uptake, and people would be less likely to complain if it were not "perfect". For $29 people don't expect as much as they do for $299+.
This only ensure the pages don't explode, you still have no idea that you are showing NASCAR stats on your NBA homepage...

Crawl and Fuzz locally:

http://github.com/relevance/tarantula