skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stackoverflow, Advertising and the Ethics of a Free Lunch
Considering that the population most at risk for HIV/AIDS might be unwilling or unable to use condoms (sex workers), having more mechanisms for preventing the disease is a Good Thing.
And just like we have spermicide to go with condoms today, we might have aminoglycoside-based topical microbicides to go with condoms
tomorrow.
I love it, great idea.
When you're the guy with a B.A. and work experience in ISP call centres, Cisco certs are a handy way of not getting your C.V. thrown out by H.R. drones :-)

(Not that I got any in the end, someone who didn't care employed me first. But they make sense for a reasonably large group of people)
Of course it is. It will far bit of money and man power but it's not infeasible by any stretch of the imagination.
"One neck to choke" is a powerful reason to deal with more than their switches.
Part of what's unfortunate about the attitude of a lot of people in the dynamic language community (honestly, Ruby attracts this far more than Python for some reason) seems to be a complete lack of understanding of why anyone would do anything differently. The same is true the other way, where Java programmers reliant on their IDEs can't imagine working without one, and vice-versa.

Used properly, static typing hurts you in some ways (verbosity, certain kinds of inflexibility) but helps you in other ways (static checking, better tools for discoverability and refactoring). As other people have pointed out, Java itself is also hampered by a lack of a few simple things, like closures and type inference, that could easily be added to the language and that other statically-typed languages have. The JVM is also hampered by the lack of hotswap to let you make changes to a running system at the very least in development, but even that limitation is being worked on by someone as part of the OpenJDK project (who knows if it'll ever make it to the official JDK, though).

There are situations where the tradeoffs are worth it, and situations where they're not. Anyone declaring the superiority of language X in all situations would do well to really try to talk to people who use other languages and understand their strengths and weaknesses instead of just dismissing them as relics of the past or slave laborers.
Woah...awesome. No thanks on that pear thing.
Tiled backgrounds designer
The problem more often than not is old laws which were legislated when something like youtube was inconceivable.
Commentary on Cheryl McKinnon to join the Nuxeo Management Team
Feasible = economically feasible. According to some youtube stats on average every minute 10 hours of video is uploaded, that means that you'd have to have people screening 2 manyears of video every day, that translates if you take into account three shifts of workers to about 2000 ftes.

If one of those happens to be slacking on the job when that privacy invading video comes by you are still open to a lawsuit, and now you have a much bigger problem liability wise because by screening you took responsibility for the content.

That 10 hours every minute is a november 2006 figure, no idea what the current amount is.
The thing is that this article makes a lot of assertions and then doesn't provide any compelling evidence for me to believe them.
Ex:

"Java makes doing dangerous (or interesting) things painful." Why? "It protects programmers from themselves." How? "If nothing else, it allows bad code to be isolated and encapsulated away from the rest of the system, protecting the other workers." Huh? Isn't this design, not language? "This comes at the cost of velocity." Huh? The tradeoff isn't immediately present to me.

And so on.
I use Phil Hagelberg's starter kit and have made a few minor customizations -- works great and minimal learning curve.

http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit
If you're not matching on variable numbers of arguments, you can just have 1 function sig and a case statement.

The thing I dislike most about erlang, besides the lack of a good macro system, is that the repl is full of annoying special cases, so you have to actually stick your code in a file with a proper module name and compile it in order to test stuff :(
I work at a start up now after working at the largest software corporation for about two years, and I guess I see the complete opposite. Sure, at the start up, we can dress how we like, show up when we want, etc.. but honestly, people dress the same as they did at the corporation, and people show up at roughly the same time. And I feel (and see) more of a trend of personal responsibility at the start up. With 20 engineers, there's no one to pass the buck to: if something breaks from your area, you fix it. Especially dealing with a live site with millions of customers, versus a two year release cycle at my previous job.

I'm going to have to disagree on the point of expertise too. At my corporate job, I tried bringing up functional programming at a happy hour and got a lot of blank stares. Anything programming related that was not directly related to the job, my coworkers didn't seem to care about. At the start up, people learn different languages for fun and try to stay up with new technology.

I know that all I've done is provide more anecdotal evidence, but my experience has been so 180 degree opposite from yours, Markus, that I felt compelled to comment. I guess the big difference I see is that of passion: corporate programmers are rarely super excited about what they work on, and start up programmers almost have to be. I'm not saying passion means a better product or success, but I'd choose working with passionate people any day of the week.
Most important:

;; Don't mix tabs and spaces
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

;; Use "newline-and-indent" when you hit the Enter key so
;; you don't need to keep using TAB to align each line.
(global-set-key "\C-m" 'newline-and-indent)

;; Get rid of the <2> with duplicate file names
(require 'uniquify)
(setq uniquify-buffer-name-style 'post-forward-angle-brackets)

And then a whole bunch of autoload statements for different programming languages.
The Big VC Thaw – Why The Market is Moving Again
i don't agree with the comments that say that this is spam, in and of itself. the job postings for the YC companies do set a certain precedent, leaving a grey area with respect to job postings that isn't quite defined.

however, i do also want to point out that this is a posting for the company that owns ebaum's world, who is infamous for its content stealing and various other shenanigans. i wouldn't touch this with a 10 ft pole.
Visualizing the Firefox "Test Pilot" tab usage dataset
Simplicity & Complexity: the blog of the Santa Fe Institute
Ask HN: What's in your .vimrc file?
Other than the default stuff of course. As you can see, my additions are quite pathetic so far (only been into vim for a few months):

set expandtab
set sts=2
if v:progname =~? "gvim"
colorscheme twilight
endif
I wouldn't be so sure he'll change his tune. At my corporate job, the majority of the people were very happy there. They were mostly older, with families, kids, mortgages, etc.. just happy to be doing a job and being compensated well for it. I was the only squeaky wheel (mostly because I was younger and didn't want that other stuff yet), and I left as soon as I could.
Aeron at the office. My company is so 2000.
^ mildweed is behind Tiny Sauce
I've used this library a few times for similar (not as good and not good enough to show off) fun- it works beautifully: http://sexpr.sourceforge.net
Bad code is good for you?
You have to compete with piracy by offering premium levels of service one where it requires your users to pay to connect to your server to say play against others across the world and other things that require a server connection.

Sure they might try to break into your server, but less will do that and that is more illegal and punishable by law at least in the states.

Piracy made hollywood and music biz innovate we should be no different.
I have never found the act of typing code to be the big time sink. The big problem is devising the algorithm for what you are doing, properly selecting libraries and understanding how maintainable the approach you are using is (patterns). Maybe I am in the minority, but the biggest time sink for me is fundamental mistakes I would make regardless of the programming language I am using. I do prefer a dynamically typed language with lambda expressions, though.... certainly faster and more fun.
Slightly off topic, but I'd be interested to see what 37signals have to say about Wave, since it seems to encroach on their core business with the added benefit of Wave being free.
"Piracy rate" doesn't seem like a useful metric; it's too dependent on your sales. I'd rather see sales numbers and piracy numbers.

If you sell 10 and have 10 pirates, that's a 50% piracy rate. If you sell 1000 and have 10 pirates (same number of pirates) that's only 1% piracy rate. The ratio is less useful and more misleading than the raw numbers.
Boy is that not the story here. It's what happens after WWII. There is pretty much no measure of currency that will change this basic story, which has two parts: USD as a reserve currency post Bretton Woods, and abandoning the gold standard giving notes no intrinsic value.
Ardipithecus FAQ
Probably the easiest thing to do would be to block access to Google video services in Italy.
And the company that developed the demo was acquired by Intel in August:

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2009/08/26/46803/i...
Google Toolbar Now Translates Pages In Firefox
I think the rationale people are using here is that it's the record companies they're pirating from not the artists.

Artists like Janis Ian ( http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html (be sure to read the follow up)) have made that point quite eloquently.

Still, the basic position is one of hypocrisy, no contest there.
It technically science, but probably not a cure.

The ability to reawaken retrocyclin genes from their 7 million years of slumber using aminoglycosides could provide a novel way to secure enhanced resistance to HIV-1 infection.

After 7 million years of no selective pressure, these genes have certainly accumulated mutations. I would put my money on the "resurrected" protein being completely useless.
An App Contest For San Francisco
I will jump on this as well.

http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=017u5tMUnMTHbSdgmjzZCSOg==...

thanks in advance!
perhaps of interest:

" for vertical split, with the pipe dividers hidden
:hi clear vertsplit
:hi vertsplit ctermbg=Black ctermfg=Black

" quit quits all
:nmap :q :qa
:nmap :wq :wqa

" H/L go to beginning/end of line without moving fingers
:nmap H 0
:nmap L $

" turn off matching paren highlighting
let loaded_matchparen = 1
"tab completion of words in insert mode
function InsertTabWrapper()
let col = col('.') - 1
if !col || getline('.')[col - 1] !~ '\k'
return "\<tab>"
else
return "\<c-p>"
endif
endfunction

inoremap <tab> <c-r>=InsertTabWrapper()<cr>
More colleges than ever offering gaming degrees
Most of what I use was copied from this excellent site:
http://www.vi-improved.org/vimrc.php
I hope they expand frustration-free product search next.

Just a rant, move on unless you want to join in…

If I click the amazon-prime box, then I only want to see amazon-prime merchandise. I don't want to see the prices if I bought the part at AffliateCo's and paid heaven knows what for shipping, or the odd product that isn't even available for prime shipping but maybe you really want to sell anyway. Show me your price and the things you ship so I can choose.

And when I search for USB keyboard mouse combos, don't sneakily slip a PS/2 one into the results. I loathe you every time I see that misbeboughtten box on my extra gear shelf.
Same here. I'd toyed with BASIC as a kid, but learning mIRC's scripting language was my first real attempt at learning to program something. I spent hours playing around in it making little utilities and add-ons and bots, etc.
"Honest work for honest pay" has not been demonized, or the social mobility that America represents, or even open capital markets.

"Greed is Good" has been demonized, as it should be. Making money by grift, insider trading and market manipulation has been demonized, as it should be. Luckily that's not what the American Dream is.
set vi
The problem is most SMB want to play it safe (i.e., use Microsoft). There are some that will play with other technologies but then one of the "business types" gets nervous and asks to go with MS.

It is probably easier to get Atlassian and the like into larger organizations. Start with a small group, kick off a pilot, get noticed by other people who want to collaborate/use your information and then grow within the organization. We use Atlassian and that is what we are hoping to do.
IBM Study: The end of advertising as we know it
Dr. Norvig is also one of the authors of a very well-regarded textbook on the current state of the AI field: http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
Lots: http://github.com/cdmwebs/dotfiles/raw/master/vimrc

Probably time to clean it up a bit.
First of all, videos originating in Italy would be a substantially smaller subset of the global figures so I don't believe the task is so incomprehensibly vast as you may think.

Second, I think the legal complaint here is that there is no attempt at screening the content until it has already been published.

I obviously don't agree with it, but it's what's being contested by the plaintiffs. And I think just showing you have safe-guards in place would show a proper intent and meet a standard of reasonable prudence.

But back to the technical issue of screening.

The solution is easy. Drop the realtime requirement. Say:

"hey, sorry Italians, we have to screen everything, we've got 100 people working on it around the clock and your video will get uploaded in two week's time. We'll email you when it's ready."

It'll make youtube less attractive, sure, but every other video publisher (vimeo, justin.tv, et al) would have to do the same thing so all in all, the courts will be happy, the italian users will have a diminished service, and the world will spin on.
And yet there are numerous people who work on pure math and theoretical physics.
the ifdef'd main in gc.c has bit rot a bit and segfaults, otherwise nice and simple.
"When in doubt, try it out!"

You could easily verify the answer by hand for small numbers of shirts, then run your debugged code to compute the answer for 100 shirts.
Some I like:

" Keep cycled-away buffers open (preserving undo,
" allowing buffer switch without write)
set hidden

" Facilities for handling pasting into vim, preserving
" indentation of the pasted text.
" This will make <F4> start paste mode and <F5> stop paste mode.
" Note that typing <F5> in paste mode inserts <F5>, since in paste
" mode everything is inserted literally, except the 'pastetoggle' key
" sequence.
map <F4> :set paste<CR>
map <F5> :set nopaste<CR>
imap <F4> <C-O>:set paste<CR>
imap <F5> <nop>
set pastetoggle=<F11>

" Toggle line-numbers with key sequence Ctrl-N-N:
nmap <C-N><C-N> :set invnumber <CR>

" Consolidate swapfiles to keep working directories clean
set directory=~/.vim/swap
178 lines of crap accumulated over about 20 years. I think I only use an indent variable setting, one key binding, and a handful of language autoloads.

delete-delete-delete save-buffer Much better.
I wonder why you were voted down (not answering OP question to the letter?) -- that's one of the nicest references I've seen.
From some other pages about this case:

(italics mine):

"Prosecutors say they are aware Google cannot screen all videos, but maintain the company didn't have enough automatic filters in place as well as warnings to users on privacy and copyright laws. They also say Google didn't have enough workers assigned to its Italian service in order to react quickly to videos flagged as inappropriate by viewers."

So, they already know screening isn't feasible, for the rest it's really only about a matter of degree, and that should carry jail terms ?
I thought it was a shoplifting deterrent. SD cards and the like have bulky, hard to open packaging to make it harder to conceal when walking out of a store. Amazon doesn't need such deterrents, so I'm glad their finally using their clout to get easier to open packaging.
GSWoT attempts to salvage Thawte Web of Trust
Map some "leader" commands for common operations, eg:

let mapleader=','
let g:mapleader=','

nmap <leader>w :w!<cr>
nmap <leader>q :q<cr>
nmap <leader>f :find<cr>
map <leader>d :execute 'NERDTreeToggle ' . getcwd()<CR>
nmap <leader>m :make<cr>

" cut & paste
map <leader>c "+y
map <leader>x "+d
map <leader>v "+p

Also quicker window navigation:

map <C-j> <C-W>j
map <C-k> <C-W>k
map <C-h> <C-W>h
map <C-l> <C-W>l
Mainly for python scripting, but works decently for most editing I do.

syntax on " syntax highlighting
set tabstop=4 " PEP-8 uses 4 spaces per indentation level
set shiftwidth=4 " shifting (PEP-8)
set expandtab " spaces instead of tabs (PEP-8, and just bettter in general)
filetype on " file type detection
filetype indent on " special indentation rules for file type
filetype plugin on " auto-completion rules for file type
set hls " highlight search terms (:noh to turn off temporarily)
set ignorecase " ignore case for searches (:set noignorecase to turn off)
set incsearch " search as you type
colorscheme darkblue " slightly nicer colour scheme
set scrolloff=15 " keep 15 lines of context on both sides of cursor when scrolling

http://github.com/paulgb/settings/blob/9ebf793bcf202589c74f3...
> This overselling soaked up the funding with empty promises and killed more basic longterm research. Lets hope serious researchers find a way to get their research funded again, despite the AI shills.

I think this is uncalled for. What makes those who worked on some of these AI problems any different from the founders of an unsuccessful startup? Both have a belief that a particular idea/plan will work and both seek to convince others to join/fund them.

Nobody really knew that many AI problems would be so tough. The people who worked on them expected success. Only through their failures did we know for sure that the problems where a lot harder than we thought.
Ask HN: is there a Firefox extension for viewing C code in the browser?
Firefox doesn't nativly ship with a handler for all content types (obviously), so often times you're prompted to download a file that you know could be viewed inside the browser.

Moreover, modern web servers ship with a robust set of content types, meaning HTTP headers are pretty descriptive about what kind of data is inside a given text file.

As a specific example, I was going to take a look at the LYSP source code (a recent post on HN), but Firefox doesn't know how to handle the HTTP header

Content-Type: text/x-csrc

As a result, I am left to save it somewhere, then view it in TextMate.

My question is: does anyone know of a Firefox addon that handles various code-related content types, and renders them inside the browser?
I think the main take away is: some jobs/companies are good, some are bad.
Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals with Haskell
Crappy roles and big companies aren't synonymous.

Talking about strawman, crappy startups and startups aren't synonymous either.
I'm the opposite, I had been pronouncing it correctly, but thinking the whole time i was incorrect and it was supposed to start with the sound post!
PushButton Labs acquires The Incredible Machine game IP
Openplaces in 13 Sentences
I just keep swap files and backup ones in my .vim/ directory

set backupdir=~/.vim/backup
set backup
set directory=~/.vim/tmp

This to see line numbers on the left (i find it a bit more readable instead of watching at the bottom-right)

set number

added a simple way to speedup my writing with (I know it's crappy but it works ...until you need to add just one bracket/quote)

" autocomplete parenthesis, brackets and braces
inoremap ( ()<Left>
inoremap [ []<Left>
inoremap { {}<Left>

" autocomplete quotes
inoremap	' '<Esc>:call QuoteInsertionWrapper("'")<CR>a
inoremap	" "<Esc>:call QuoteInsertionWrapper('"')<CR>a
inoremap	` `<Esc>:call QuoteInsertionWrapper('`')<CR>a

function! QuoteInsertionWrapper (quote)
let col = col('.')
if getline('.')[col-2] !~ '\k' && getline('.')[col] !~ '\k'
normal ax
exe "normal r".a:quote."h"
end
endfunction

and mapped f1/f2 to switch buffer

noremap <f1> :bprev!<CR>
noremap <f2> :bnext!<CR>

Some of this wall of text was stolen from a nice, but a bit too big, vimrc i found somewhere

If you need something specific try http://vim.wikia.com/
I do a lot of copying/pasting from my browser (and other random places), so these mappings make my life easier:

" copy/paste with the system clipboard
map ^P "+gP
map ^C "+y

Also this, for dealing with DOS-style stuff:

" map <ctrl>+s to remove ^M from the ends of lines
map ^S :%s\/^M\/\/g
An important factor that I remember when we went over this in Engineering Ethics:

The Citigroup executive vice president was a trained engineer.

"Reed was well equipped to understand the problem. He had an engineering background, and he had been involved in the design and construction of Citicorp Center"
In 1996, the year that it was introduced, the Motorola StarTac cost $1000.

How much would you pay for one today?

In 2007, the year that it was introduced, the iPhone 8GB cost $600 with a carrier subsidy.

How much would you pay for one today? Well, I don't know how much you would pay for one, but a more advanced model costs $99 with a carrier subsidy.

I don't think it is safe to say how the next 4 billion people are going to get online and what technology they will have access to.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head as to why I don't want to end up in BigCo. I worked as a cog in a moderately sized company that had been around for a good deal of time. I felt like the work I did didn't honestly matter. I was scolded harshly for my mistakes and hardly recognized for my achievements. Now I'm doing web development with two other guys in a cool little house-turned-office. I show up when I want to and I dress how I want to. I'm appreciated for my work, and I feel like I'm actually doing something useful.

I can understand how the whole "dress like you want to and show up when you can" thing can make people automatically think of laziness, but I really disagree. I show up when I'm ready to get some shit done. When I was working at the more "standard" business, I had to show up at 8, whether or not I was actually capable of doing any sort of real work. I'm far more productive being able to set my own hours, and so are my two co-workers. We do in a week what used to take my previous employer over a month to do (with a significantly smaller workforce).
Ask HN: What's in your .emacs file?
So there is currently an "Ask HN" on the front page, "What's in your .vimrc file" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856051).

It is only fair that there be an emacs version active at the same time.
I agree with the prevailing sentiment here regarding censorship of user submitted content on sites like youtube. I can also see it would make more economic sense for google to simply deny the service to Italy if the case succeeded.
But wait a minute! Doesn't google already censor content for China?
My .emacs: http://github.com/jrockway/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs

Supporting files: http://github.com/jrockway/elisp/tree/master/_local

Perhaps worth stealing: http://github.com/jrockway/elisp/blob/master/_local/term-ext...

Total lines: 2396. (I am not averse to changing a few defaults.)
A Process Approach to Effectively Managing Sales & Marketing
"... So how does a 'free' service pay for itself? ..."

Missed the obvious of replicating the service for foo (verticals) & charge for the codebase: cf http://moms4mom.com/about
We bought ebaumsworld from Eric Bauman and we do not steel content.
http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/bookinforev/al1...

http://www.santafe.edu/research/publications/bookinforev/al2...

http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Order-Self-Organization-Select...