skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... Modern US infantrymen patrol with gear that must be damn near 50% bodyweight if not more. As for the Roman legionaries, who set up a fortified camp every night, a marathon and a half? ..."

USMC require individuals to be able to march 50Miles in battle order per day. Don't know for how long they can keep this up for. But to give you an idea how far people can be pushed the best time for the in Melbourne is 100Km/h (62 Ml) for a team of four to traverse the course is 10 hours and 35 minutes, over rough terrain. They must be pretty fit because the "Queen's Gurkha Signals Regiment HK" team ran it 11 hours 27 minutes in 2003 ~ http://www2.oxfam.org.au/trailwalker/Melbourne/about/history...
Moolenaar is one of my biggest heroes in the software world. He created a tool (vim) that is probably on the short list of great free software... one that has catalyzed the creation of so many other tools. And he did it in the name of charity, to raise money for a children's clinic in Uganda.

If I end up having one tenth of the positive influence on the world as this fellow has already done, I'll count my life successful.
Huh, interesting. I was going to post a nit-picking comment about ‘iPhone OS’ being OS X as well (Apple even used to refer to it as ‘OS X iPhone’) but now they seem to be using your nomenclature. E.g.: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/referencelibrary/G...
I am with you. This is going over and over, the FIA, the FIFA, the NBA, the NFL, and now the IOC. Sometimes I am just so tired to hear about the abuse/misinterpretation of Copy Right laws that I do not want to talk about it. However I always ended saying how silly these companies are in trying to "protect" their "rights".
Yes but nothing stops a botter from running thousands of bots re-tweeting the main spambot's tweets.
The Simple Cloud API
Rewriting Playdar: C++ to Erlang, with code statistics
My favorite computer of all time was the Powerbook G4 12". Sturdy build, full size keys, and internal DVD. Were it not for Apple's switch to Intel, I'd still be using it.

Was that a netbook? Not quite, but I really wish Apple would bring it back.
this question comes up a lot at forums , discussions. You either have to be lucky or not lucky but mathematically one can build ones luck as the law of probability says you can not be lucky only so many number of times , the more failed try's the closer you are. Its not a a motivational speech by a management guru its maths . If u flip a coin a 1000 times you would get an equal number , 500 heads and tails
Not being able to install any application is irrelevant.

The fact is, I can install a large number of applications on my iPhone, the device is readily available, and has a great web experience.

The point of a netbook in the first place is to be able to access the web, and be able to quickly get at the web - not to be able to install all applications.
Is Verizon’s network better, or is it simply untested?
Controlled Competitiveness
Harnessing my zeal gives me a competitive edge.
Presentation Folders Are Great Creation
Shop by Color (Innovative user interface to a shop)
Tail-call is an implementation detail. The fact that some people think it's as fundamental to programming as the Ten Commandments is to the Judeo-Christian tradition is... well, perhaps more a problem with programmers than with language implementations.

(and yes, it's visible, and that's one reason why I have issues with it -- it's a classic leaky abstraction, except in this case the "leak" is more like a torrential flood)
That's a good idea! I have one question regarding using dry erase walls/sheets without the marker holder bar on the bottom...did you have the dry marker residue all over the floor all the time?
I love that the title of this post rendered well on @ newsycombinator

http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/5053508006
"... Activity for activity's sake isn't necessarily a good thing ..."

Good point you need a purpose but I figure when I leave this earth I'm going in a well used, experienced and smashed up body. To get the best out of things you really have to push it. I train x-country ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157594284549274... & http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157621928042355...

"... lack of any external movement, combined with emotional challenges from games, movies, and such, mean that we've got these bodies made for running around and physically stimulating ourselves yet we're pushing them to sit still and run on artificially-induced stress. ..."

Agreed. You fair much better physically hard psychologically. The thing I've most noted is this takes time in modern lifestyles. Who else takes out at least 2hrs/day to do this? For bench warmers this is what it takes minimum to get optimum benefit.
Another stumbling block to innovation and engagement in Aussie Software development and 'new media' market. Typical!
A first glance over Wolfram Alpha’s Webservice API
Humans are still evolving despite modern medicine.
We are in Hawai'i and I only know of one other real composite shop here. If we were in California or someplace else I could see that being a great option.
> OSX was terrible

That might have been because early 'Gold' versions of OSX were considered by many to be of sub-standard quality. I personally feel that OSX should have been released at 10.3 or at least 10.2. Not necessarily with all the 'frills' like iChat (which they introduced in 10.2) and such, but with the stability of the underlying OS at that point.
> "Unless you use lisp, you can't understand why lisp is the best language"

Of course we all know that Lisp is just a semi-imperative hack. Real programmers use something more pure like Clean or Haskell nowadays.

Anyway, I just wanted to applaud you two for the civility ouf your discourse. It was an informative read.
I'd love to discuss this further, but I've had a rough day. I need to just drop the conversation at this point.

Good talking with you.
Yes and what about other countries?
I'm in 99% agreement with the exception that the iPhone is unusable for anything that requires terminal/shell access. Even with a shell app on a jailbroken phone, the keyboard/screen just make it too hard.

A netbook or tablet+bluetooth keyboard OTOH would be a little more handy for that. Not saying it would be enough for me to buy one, just an observation.
Read the article, he explains why.
Ask YC: Is hacking question for all founders?
On the app, there's a question: Please tell us about the time you, (name), most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Is that for all founders or only the person submitting the app?
As much as that sounds really useful, I think it steps outside the bounds of what Haystack is for. Haystack has no interest in keeping track of specific projects, billing etc.

Haystack IMHO is just a card catalog — a painless way to get a basic idea of a designer's work. No more, no less.
I just kept the erasers in a box on my desk, which was easy enough. We didn't have any problems with residue on the floors, either. It's just not a lot of residue, especially when you spread it out over such a huge surface.
this would have made for a great yc company.. maybe jobspice can branch out into this niche space a bit
I'm not getting any shots. I have a compromised immune system, so a lot of people think I "should". But I take other precautions which work very well for me.
How exactly would an attacker have enough access to your encrypted data to do a diff attack? If he has physical access to the machine you're going to be compromised regardless of the details of the encryption scheme.
"... matching designer’s work so they can hone in visually: ..."

Interesting to see the contrast b/w 'visual' search to search by 'algorythm'. Less work involved, product gets out quicker and works. Will the machine, the algorythm make selection better (easier for users). I'm thinking of Demand in particular ~ http://stephenlaughlin.posterous.com/demand-media-uses-algor...
Indeed. I think I'd be even happier with, say, an 11- or 11.5-inch widescreen laptop, just wide enough to have a full-sized keyboard, but with no extra space beyond that. These aluminum 13-inch unibody machines are extremely nice, and have fantastic build quality, but I wish they were just a tad smaller.
Note how he used the word "I", and not "you".
When someone throws around the phrase "work ethic" too much, I tend to start looking for the other hand with the knife in it as they're usually looking for their pound of flesh, and it's usually from the person whose work ethic they are questioning.
lol.. no I don't mean to mean anything, just curious.
I did not know that! Seriously. May I recall all the times I've misused "error".
U.S. Orders Deep Pay Cuts at Companies Who Received Bail-Out Funds
Glenn Beck : Net Neutrality a Marxist Plot to take over Internet
Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On
Welcome to Australia. Please set your clocks forward 19 hours, and your politics back 20 years.
How personality gets translated into physical elements in your space
You might try LyX ("lick"): http://wiki.lyx.org/Mac/Mac?from=LyX.LyXOnMac

It's basically a fancy front-end for LaTeX, and might do what you need. The printed output would certainly look nice.
Looks like [1] they're a web design firm that's created web sites for twitter, Urban Dictionary, Alexa, and Best Buy.

[1] http://pivotallabs.com/clients
This is interesting and valid, but to be fair it looks like playdar operates entirely where C++ has no advantages: io bound. It's surprising he didn't figure it a bad choice the first time around. Comparing Erlang to a Perl or Python version would be more interesting.
The growing case for a jobless recovery
On the Thank You note
Ok I am going to get slammed for this, but it has to be said:

Women are evolving to be shorter AND heavier!!!?? WTH. This is a disaster. I blame myself. I am not having sex with as many tall thin women as I should be. This is definately a wake-up call.
Because the result in Erlang will not be a dict, it will be a list of key/value pairs. That's not the same.

Doing that automatically means you have to do something else to label it as a key/value list meant to back to a dict.

These are not insurmountable problems, just issues that have to be dealt with. Any problem in Erlang can be solved with another layer of record indirection, but those don't come for free.

I must not have looked closely enough to find the source; I did try.
HeyZap Helps Flash Games Go Viral With New API
Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You
White tile/melamine/shower board works pretty well too. It ghosts a little bit, but it's ridiculously cheap, like $13 for 4' x 8'.
he is sometimes abrasive, which i'd prefer he wasn't. but he has his finger on the pulse of the apple ecosystem like no one else.

and it seems to me that articles like this are occasionally warranted, because the attitude in the tech press about apple has always been 'wow, this company totally doesn't act like microsoft! clearly, they need to act more like microsoft' for decades, to the point where it's infuriating.
Wikipedia page on Scheme: recently revised, expanded, and updated
I have to disagree with some portions of this article. Working as a musician is waaay different from working at a corporate sweat shop. This whole "work ethic" rant is a little misleading, especially pertaining to music.
Sounds familiar. I've been working on an app for a couple of months but am putting it on hold because my blog posts and tweets haven't generated any preliminary interest, AdWords rates in the category are too high and the development life cycle for the product is too long.

Meanwhile I need to start bringing in some income so I'm hoping to find consulting work. So I'll be thinking about some more ideas (quickly, because there's not much time).

Depending on the platform Heroku's Blossom plan might be a good hosting option for a portfolio app.
Great pictures.

Along with stressing yourself in various ways, I think getting outside is a natural part of being human too. No matter how great a shape you get into, there's always something artificial about the gym.
BlackBerry Bold 9700 coming to AT&T, T-Mobile
The Kindle DRM is trivially broken. Kindle ebooks are basically just Mobipocket ebooks.
Voting machine source-code leak shows odd subroutines
Less overhead. Sometimes it just makes sense to use a binary format on top of a binary channel.
This may be uncharacteristically abrasive and terse, but fuck this country. (yes, I live here, and want to leave)
>I believe they can't make this apply to previous versions,

Correct. GPL gives all the recipients of the software sufficient rights to relicense it to anyone they want under GPL. If sun wants to stop licensing MySQL under GPL to people, they can do so. After that, anyone else who has an older valid license can license it to you.

>so this may end up being a community-driven fork of MySQL.

There already is.
tail call elimination is a language feature. The GIL is an implementation detail of the Cpython interpreter. Jython, IronPython, and one day PyPy and Unladen-Swallow will not have a GIL.

Ergo, it is an implementation detail.
Glenn Beck thinks everything is a Marxist plot.
I'm told you can mix C++ and Objective C, so should be fine.
Well, if I ran the zoo, it would be retargetable to multiple graphic modes (I'm going to be running it in ssh+tmux half the time, so I'd prefer curses) and have a mix of vi's modal keybinding style and Emacs's buffer/mark ring/etc. model and extensibility.

Then again, with 2k loc, it shouldn't be that hard to break out the GTK...

UI model nonwithstanding, that's exactly the sort of project that Lua is designed for.
All this is saying is that iphone apps should be on the same playing field as all other computer games sold in Australia. Which is fair enough.

Now, I'm the first person to hate on Stephen Conroy and his ridiculously communist sensorship ideals, but this isn't really one of them.
> Bandwidth limitations.

This is going to be a big problem - the simple physics of it, means it's much more limited than wired.

> I write mobile software for a living

I always wondered about that. Do you write native apps, or is it some kind of HTML? I see so many: WAP, WML, XHTML-MP. Which do I use if I want to get started?
I wish I could upvote this twice. I'm surfing on one right now. It's just right lap-sized for my wife and I. It's going to be my couch computer for a looooong time. Until Apple makes something small again. It doesn't have to be a cheap-o netbook it just has to be little.
I hope this post comes off okay. I've been visiting your country for a few weeks now on holiday, and I've found both here and NZ to be places with wonderful people and scenery.

Having said that, both places seem to have a bit of the nanny-state complex. I can sympathize that it is frustrating -- but it's not all bad, by any means. We've had a wonderful time.

I'm not sure I would chose to live here, however. I've traveled and lived in a bunch of places in the states, and the attitude seems a bit different here. I remember being in NZ last week and seeing the front page of one of their papers -- "New Zealand's Millionaires". It was three or four poor blokes mug-shotted on the front page, just like they had been caught robbing a liquor store or something. The message was clear: rich people have somehow cheated their way to the top. These guys are not to be emulated (except maybe as hoodlums)

So that (and a few other things) makes me more of a visitor who would like to come back than somebody who would want to live here. I think there are a lot of people who are really laid back, and just a few who want to micro-manage everybody else. Unfortunately it only takes a few....
Where do you want to go? I'm Australian too and I don't see many good options.
Comments on "Why Engineers Should Consider Formal Methods"
Presumably, he means that netbook sales would cannibalize high end laptop sales. But that's doubtful.

In order to compete with other netbooks, a hypothetical Apple netbook would necessarily be the least expensive Mac. This would definitely cannibalize their sale of better models to first-time customers, who currently constitute a significant portion of Apple's Mac sales (as much as 50% from their retail stores).

It comes down to a question which set of customers is going to be more profitable: customers looking for "a cheap laptop" or customers looking for "an Apple computer". All else being equal, I think it's obvious that the latter is more desirable. The mistake that many in the press have made is assuming that these customers are in short supply and that Apple will begin struggling to find them Real Soon Now, but this hasn't turned out to be the case. There may be more of the former kind, but would Apple really be able to capture two, three, four times as many of them as they are their current customers?
Subjectivism
If Google agreed to pay twitter for this information, this may set a precedent that google would rather not have and that some publishers have been pushing for for a while, that Google pay people to have their content crawled.
"Australia: We're going backwards!" or "Australia: We want to control everything you see!"
It also helps that you can get an Intel Core2 Duo 13" Unibody Macbook for $899 in Apple's refurb section. (With the same warranty as the new ones.)
What Causes Skin Cancer
Good for us that they never got too big and complacent.

It reminds me of the Avis motto: "We Try Harder."
Henry Blodget promoting Mary Meeker content - early dot-com days indeed.
3 Reasons Why YC Winter 2010 Advisors Should Pick Our Startup
I am part of a 3 man startup team building a marketplace for travel itineraries called Sidepaths. As the deadline for YCW2010 fast approaches and choices need to be made, I would like to sum up my application in 3 points:

1- It's no joke starting a startup, but we're smiling all the way through. This is the attitude you may find amongst my 2 partners and I.

2- Our startup is a bootstrapped project, but our effort in building something of quality is anything but. Our skills complement us in some of the best possible ways.

3- We're a great team and our product is rigorously built. But more importantly, there is a market for what we are building.

I wrote this in the hopes of garnering a bit of extra attention to our application. YC or not, we're building this anyway. But we have a lot of questions, and would sure like some help. Thanks and good luck to all.
"verbage" ~= verbiage?
Gruber's logic is probably faulty. If there were an Apple netbook/table, people wouldn't stop buying normal apple laptops. They'd buy these in addition, and in much greater numbers.

Apple has 10% marketshare. If they put out smaller, lower cost system, it's unlikely that the losses from existing mac users switching to a lower cost system would outweight the gains of people who would buy a decent mac netbook over a crappy windows one.
Ten months ago RJ wanted to write Playdar in Erlang but was worried about the portability of packaging and distributing the Erlang VM. As it stands this is still an untested area for desktop software… but ten months gives you a long time to think about things, and it's going to work, so yay.
it makes sense. i listen to all kinds of music within gmail chat where normal ads are not shown. also i can imagine google wanting to play music inside google wave, and this would also require them to license the music.

i've said this before but now it's really starting to become apparent: google wave is the google OS; the webOS that we've been talking about.
I like Gruber because he gets Apple without being a fanboy. Some people would disagree, but those tend to be Apple haters who irrationally believe that Apple's success consists solely of pulling the wool over people's eyes with clever marketing. Gruber on the other hand, repeatedly sets the record straight on Apple in a way that would be quite informative to analysts if they paid attention.

I have to admit though it's fun to watch analysts' perennial struggle to understand what makes a user-experience driven company work. Even after Apple almost kicked the bucket following all that analyst advice in the 90s, there is always this contingent that somehow thinks Apple should be Dell + Microsoft.
Same for me, wonder why that got you modded down.

First to market is worth something, if you actually have a product. If you're only first to market with an announcement and an empty page you make yourself look a little foolish to jump the gun like that.

I'm reasonably sure that when google announces their twitter search that it will at least work.

Time will tell though.
Being first to market is fine if it works. If you actually search for anything at all you get an error page.
Thanks for the reply. How does an exit() after header() help? It still causes a discontinuity in an IDE.
Distributing Erlang applications may be untested, but there have been good canned cross platform packagers for Perl for some time now. I'm sure the situation is the same for Python et al.
People also tend to have investment bias. Once you've invested in something, you're likely to think it is more valuable than if you haven't. To put it simply, we humans have trouble thinking from a different perspective, and we tend to focus on what we'd lose rather than gain. Thus, people who own their own business would be biased towards thinking that running their own business is the better option.

Yeah, I've been reading Predictably Irrational.
We all get a great sense of schadenfreude when formerly profligate corporations get their comeuppance in this way but the pay czar role (whether in the form of an individual or a political committee) is in reality fraught with problems for taxpayers.

If the government is to be anything than a long-term host for parasitical companies, the idea is to have the companies turn around. Yet who worth his salt will remain at such companies if the compensation needed to keep them competitive with otherwise similarly situated companies is not there - or, worse, was there but was cut by a "pay czar' for who knows what reasons (especially bad if people have their pay cut in order to appease popular prejudices)?

Yet what "pay czar" worth his salt will not want to scrutinize all salaries closely for companies that have been feasting at the public trough? Of course, that is his job and he must do it to be responsible.

Sometimes such cuts will be more than warranted; other times, they will be arbitrary. There really is no good measure for determining which is which. Hence, it can all become political or not and only the bureaucrats and politicians will ever know - of course, those directly affected will also know and they will not likely stick around for more if they are indeed working hard only to have political factors wind up hurting them economically with no recourse but to have to suck it up.

And so the whole system is calculated to do anything but help the companies turn around, at least as this might happen through having competitively paid and motivated individuals in positions of ultimate responsibility.

I do not say this out of sympathy for the corporations. Most of them richly deserve all that they are getting right now. But the poor taxpayer is not well-served either, as a losing approach goes from bad to worse in all likelihood, with the taxpayer perpetually on the hook for more.
The American government is not well known for deliberately poisoning millions of its country's citizens for the lulz.
This has a massive impact on the language semantics, and should not be decided lightly - it strongly pushes it towards nested statements, rather than imperative steps with a result. Not as clear a distinction as pure functional vs. imperative, but with much of the same design baggage.
...it wouldn't be as big an issue if Python's closures and scoping weren't problematic as well.
It's not dictating the code architecture -- it's one of many factors to consider

Naturally I'm using a session variable. But the URL mismatch remains.