skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to use Flex for AIR development, but I think I'm about to switch to HTML/JavaScript now. Here are a few reasons:

- I can reuse more (code, designs, etc.). This, obviously, will vary for different people. If you are Flash/Flex developer already your situation will likely to be quite the opposite.

- HTML is easier than MXML. Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, too.

- jQuery. HTML/CSS/JS wins.

- Webkit (HTML) engine is less clunky than Flex. GUIs are, IMHO, snappier when built with Webkit, and this is very important to me. Also, Webkit support for effects and animations is surprisingly good (although Flash beats it easily in this area).

- Aptana IDE is free and is very good (never tried Dreamweaver, though)

So, here you have another opinion. However, it is worth stating that Adobe favors use of Flash/Flex for developing AIR applications (not sure why), so you'll have to jump through some hoops in order to get started. Aptana helps a lot.

Finally, I must say that it's a pity you have to choose. Ideally, you would combine the best of both worlds for your app. And although technically feasible (Flash libraries can be used in a HTML project, and HTML pages can be loaded into Flex application), it is very hard to do, because of the two totally different IDEs (Flex Builder and Aptana) which make debugging such "cross-over" application very hard. So, I guess you'll have to choose. Good luck!
REST Framework for .NET Inspired by Sinatra and ASP.NET MVC
"Not available for your country" =(
Try Twitter! Use Twitter search and enter in terms specific to the problem you are trying to solve. You'd be surprised how many qualified people are on Twitter and sharing their ideas and willing to help. That is how I found a developer for a project I am working on!
And it yet goes to show that anybody smart can maim or kill others. Call it a MacGuyver-ism or something.

And yet in all these cases, it took intent.

Cases that could be done:

1. Self-inflict nasty disease. Anthrax/Ebola/H1N1

2. Surgery to put a bomb in a stomach. Im sure a chop-doc could do it in Tijuana for the right price.

3. Bomb in laptop or other computerized hardware.

4. Nerve agents: the local news showed barrels and barrels of a nerve agent and where you could find them. Wonder why no terrorist watches the news where this stuff can be easily found.

And the "best solution" is to have the company hire an anesthesiologist and put all passengers to sleep and stack them in racks.
"Born to Run" has popularized this notion that the human body evolved to run long distances. However, there is no strong proof for it. The recent discoveries from the Ardipithecus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus) stories suggest that "both A. kadabba and A. ramidus lived in "a mosaic of woodland and grasslands with lakes, swamps and springs nearby," but further research is needed to determine which habitat Ardipithecus at Gona preferred".

When it comes to evolution, I don't think a popular book can provide all the answers. I wish they'd make it clear that this is just one theory now widely popularized by a best selling book.
A decent and Pythonic library for llvm.
Sparkfun just started selling a book called "Electrical Engineering 101". I've never read it, but I imagine it's pretty good.

Do you have access to a good electronics lab? A lab + H&H might be sufficient. I learned 80% of my electronics this way, but the last 20% was learned from old crusty EEs. If you don't have access to a lab, you can build your own (oscilloscope, function generator, power supply) for a few hundred dollars. I don't know where you can find old crusty EEs.
Heresy! Techcrunch has taught us well that the only way for a new service/protocol/whatever to be born is by tearing its way free out the entrails of another, more mature, not-as-hot-right-now protocol.

Sorry for the imagery, I just thought it fit with the D&D theme :)
On the contrary, hackers probably understand better than most how novel solutions can make a seemingly insurmountable problem disappear. For instance

- irrigation greatly improved agriculture in arid regions
- drought resistant wheat solved hunger for billions of people (Borlaug)
- automatic telephone switches prevented the US from being a nation of telephone operators
- sewers drastically reduced water-borne illness and made cities liveable
- cars prevented the huge waste problem that millions of horses caused in cities

Similarly, price signals have made people change habits before, like how rising labor costs made the modestly wealthy do their own housework as they could no longer afford servants or how people who love the land move to cities because the prospects are better.

Sure, the impending peak oil crisis looks like a problem, but not only do I expect that the combination of ingenuity and prices will produce a change, people like Amory Lovins at RMI have already shown how to profitably slash energy use at low oil and energy prices.
I had some entrepreneurial drive as a kid (selling origami, candy arbitrage, etc) but got in trouble and unfortunately the "Don't fight the system" message was louder than the entrepreneurial urge. I still worked hard mowing lawns, summer jobs, etc. What was missing was the idea that I could create arbitrarily large amounts of value for it and charge accordingly.
The success of such a scheme would depend on the quality of the software. I could imagine software that would have many advantages over traditional teachers. It would be a hell of a piece of machine learning, however. Given what I've seen of the very best of the chatbots, it is a long, long way off. If you really want to see this come to pass, I suggest you get programming.
It leads the reader to believe batteries are more dangerous than the water. While that might be true, it leaves out the reasoning behind 3-1-1. The batteries may be more dangerous than a bottle of water, but they are not more dangerous than a water bottle filled with liquid explosives.

How about:

Batteries may be more dangerous than a stick, but they aren't more dangerous than a man poking you with that stick.

Batteries may be more dangerous than a kitten, but they aren't more dangerous than a kitten who is about to jump with claws ready on your face.
New Jersey officials want to "fry" him in the electric chair

The "terr'ist!" and "gitmo!" stuff is just jingoism.

But... that's what we do in the US. Execute computer hackers. In a state that has banned capital punishment, no less.

My favorite pastime is calling up the sheriffs posse and having a good ol' lynchin' for petty thievery, cavort'n and port scann'n.
This link isn't working for me. Here is an alternative:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-image...
At least on 4chan you can't get downmodded for posting facts that the groupthink finds inconvenient.

That seems to be the real advantage of anonymous discussion: you don't think to yourself "will I get downvoted/flamed/etc for posting this comment?" Though, as 4chan has proven, the level of discourse on an anonymous forum is just as proportional to the maturity of its members... as it is anywhere else.
How Google uses Linux
Ask HN: Who do you follow?
I'm trying to load up my twitter feed with people who actually have signal when it comes to valuable information about programming.

So, who do you follow to keep on top of tech?
Apprupt: Analytics & Marketing for iPhone App Performance
"INTERNAL MEDICINE": HEPATITIS
Data Liquidity or how we can use ARRA’s $19 Billion wisely
Agreed. The best thing human teachers bring is their ability to adapt. Its not about answering questions, but seeing where a student is having problems and figuring out how best to solve that.
Instant Idea Feeback for Entrepreneurs
wave is doing a good job of replacing it for me! with:public = gold
TSA Response to XKCD “Bag Check” Cartoon
Because humans are social beings. Sure, most of us are good at self-learning, but a good teacher can provide so much more than a textbook can. A good teacher is a mentor and a dispenser of wisdom (and opinion). They've been there before, so they know what the hard stuff is, and where you might go wrong in your thinking.

And it's more fun to learn from a person than from a book. There's interaction. You can ask hard questions and they can provide profound answers that lead to other questions. Try doing that with a textbook.
IT industry graveyard 2009
I agree, it is very obvious that Joel would promote his own software. That's not really what I intended my post to be about though.

Joel has long said he only hires great programmers that know CS theory in and out. I don't think that's changed, he's just also identified that recent graduates are lacking in time-management and collaboration skills needed to be good industrial programmers. However, he isn't just having a debate about academic vs vocational education but offering paid internships, and now sponsoring one of these Capstone groups, in an effort to give students the skills he thinks they are missing.
I would be glad to see the jQuery discussions moved to a normal forum and moderated accordingly. A good idea would be to use a HN style forum.

Google has failed to contain spam, even on discussion lists for their own offerings.

It is actually good advise to curate your own data.
The genius brothers behind Google Wave
It's not like you cannot run PostgreSQL on EC2 if you want.
Cd Jackets Are Graceful Printing Products
This isn't violating any laws of physics instead it is economists not taking into account well economics... companies vested in energy aren't going to say that they aren't going to have energy in the future, same goes for oil and car producers and it actually ends up trickling down.
I disagree that there's a specific reason for his feeling lost; this is probably due to still feeling some of that myself (I'm nearly 25), though.

That said, I joined a startup as his age. Younger, actually - I was 18. It was a good experience in that I learned a great deal of technical knowledge very quickly and it laid the path for the career that I've formed since then, but it's not a remedy for a spiritual problem.

I'll qualify my experience to say that the first startup I worked at was not a good company; our president was arguably a snake-oil salesman in a lot of ways, and myself/the other engineers often worked 'deathmarches' leading to a moment where I was literally told during a doctor's appointment that I would have a heart attack before I could legally drink if I didn't find a new job.

I don't regret the job, overall; I learned a lot professionally and personally, and the next startup was far more successful. I do regret not wandering a little more, though, and he should take this opportunity.
This is a problem I see plaguing several code-related groups that I'm following, and it is very annoying (and up till now, mystifying) to see not only showing up in regular message flow, but also in abridged once-a-day summaries.

It's nice to see Google maintaining stuff like Groups and Code, but they don't seem to get very good maintenance. I've been finding myself saying the phrase "I wish they'd move this project away from google code and onto github" quite frequently lately. I suspect I'll be saying something similar for groups very soon..
Would have done exactly the same thing in their shoes.

And just remember, without Reddit, all we'd have is Digg and ultra cool Kevin Rose hipsters dancing in the streets.. What an awful world that would be..

Best of luck to Alexis and Steve and thanks for your awesome contribution to the landscape.
I am one of the creators of Contraptor.org - Just do what my partner and I have been doing for the last 2 years. Just build it yourself :) The pay for contraptor path is for people who.
A. Do not have access to drill / drill press hack saw / cutt off saw.
B. Do not want to mess with it.
C. Do not have the time to do it.

With prices the way they are now we are breaking even. (If that) It costs money to fab stuff apparently :) Anyhow, thanks for the kind words.

ril3y
Not all are evil, try Hapylink at http://hapylink.com
Vim Magic Option
Then it is time for you to use a safe URL shortenner: http://safe.mn/ :-) IE, these URLs could lead to a "dangerous" website, but you are warned before reaching the final destination: http://safe.mn/-M http://safe.mn/WP http://safe.mn/TU http://safe.mn/Te
Could I ask what path you ended up making for yourself, and any insights you had on the way to discovering that particular direction?
See the real problem with that is I am probably neither fun nor witty and probably wouldn't be able to handle creating a fake world and exploring said world. I couldn't even play WoW when a friend bought me an account (but thats probably more heroin than cocaine).
JLambda: A jQuery plugin for succinct anonymous functions
I'm one of the people working on this project, and would really appreciate any feedback! Especially from the HN community.
Field looks interesting but I'm a bit skeptical about its usability after downloading it and poking around for a few minutes. One thing that seems incontestable is that the GUI is in need of a serious redesign to make it usable. I have 20/20 vision and the lack of contrast renders text very difficult to read. This problem seems to exist throughout the application (and on the website btw).
Limor,

Thanks for the comments. You should be glad to know that on my flickr page I am in fact using one of your open source hardware projects with my contraptor stuff :) The motor shield. Check it..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31697990@N00/4045043959/
Next year I get access to my schools machine shop and metal scraps so I'll hopefully be able to build something along these lines.
Why do you think the wisdom dispensed by some random teacher is worth listening to?

Why not dispense wisdom via software from highly successful people?
Cisco Buys ScanSafe For $183 Million
The point of his post is that the market opportunity doesn't exist because the firms professionals are expected to enter take care of that domain-specific training themselves.

For a very long time there has been a "tradition" of sending newly graduated engineers to work on the manufacturing floor, or in product testing for a while so they get background in the business before actually having to design anything. Such a tradition seems to be missing in software development.
I am partial to http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/
Surgery to put a bomb in a stomach

Turns out that this isn't really viable. The human body is quite good at absorbing explosions.
Can someone explain what benefit Conde Nast sees in owning reddit?

I'm not trying to be offensive or anything, I just don't understand how reddit fits into the Conde Nast business.

(and yeah, I realize this question is about three years late to the party)
Your analogy falls short at the end there...

A teenage girl bragging about her fashion sense or poetic style does not directly equate to the statement 'I want to make video games'. Unless, of course, you are implying that anyone who makes that statement has already tried and failed at creating successful video games and are now doomed and hopeless before they even hit the campus floor (as I am assuming that teenage girl is because, well...her poems suck).

I wanted to make video games. I went to a school specifically for that. I made it halfway through. The reality (to me, at least) was that the industry was just not worth it. The average lifespan of a game developer is 5 years...before total burnout ensues, and you are left entirely drained, hopefully with some bank though. But above all that, I decided to drop out because of a very simple and fundamental reason: It took all the mystery out of games...the X-factor, if you will.

This is not just refined to games of course...I feel that this happens all over the place, and the simplest answer as to why could just be that we as humans LOVE to learn. Just the prospect of learning some new language or about a new technology can spike a persons motivation to new heights, even if it is short-lived...we keep going.
Predicting Social Security Numbers
Direct link to Randall's comment: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/10/response-to-bag-check-cartoo...
2 things.

Firstly; I think XKCD was just being amusing....

Secondly: bullcrap. You can make a bang big enough to kill a plane with laptop batteries - the fact you can make a bigger bang with liquids is surely irrelevant. And also it's perfectly possible to change the contents of a battery - no? So put something more explosive in it....

Batteries are very easy to remove.

The reason liquids were banned is because of the evidence someone came up with the suggest there were liquid bombs being planned (and I think one failed attempt) - not a bad response at all! It's the same reason a lot of airports (especially UK ones) ask you to remove your shoes and Xray them.

At the end of the day they can only respond to the perceived or suspected risks - if you really put your mind too it it shouldnt actually be too hard to smuggle a bomb on a plane.

EDIT: by which I mean it is more a case of making people feel safe (by inconveniencing them, basic psycology) as well as causing more inconvenience for a small number of possible potential attacks. The actual security effect is fairly minimal - simply for practical reasons pointed out a billion times over.
Perhaps machine learning with a massive data set would do a better job of adapting?
Read this: http://blog.woobling.org/2009/05/why-i-dont-use-couchdb.html

The system doesn't really settle. Imagine there are two versions of a record. Your process reads the old one, and generates a completely new record based on that data. Later on, "eventual consistency" removes that original "old" record; the "new" one won. Well, that affects that initial record, but it doesn't affect records that used data from that record to make new records. So the database gradually becomes filled with data that is completely inconsistent. There is no such thing as "eventual consistency". (Transactions handle this problem; if your new record is based off of old data, your transaction will abort. If you commit successfully, you know that your data is consistent.)

Now, if you never use your data to make new data, and none of your records are related to each other via links, and you never need to create more than one record at once, CouchDB is fine. But it seems to encourage people to throw away basic data integrity for some magical scalability reasons, which is probably a premature optimization.

(And I say this as someone who only uses relational database rarely. The relational model does not fit my problem space very often, but strict transactional semantics always do.)
Amazon's new MySQL "cloud" MySQL service looks very positive on the surface, but there are a number of things that will need to be addressed before serious production use for large sites can leverage this offerings. They are:

1) Replication. Very very few large production Web sites run with one database server. The need to dynamically scale replicas and slave servers is critical for many Web applications.

2) Lock in to InnoDB tables. From what I've seen you can only run InnoDB tables. For some, MyISAM is a requirement, and in some cases provides better query performance.

These two issues right here are why I continue to run my MySQL server infrastructure myself in EC2. If and when they address those two critical components I'll most certainly give the new offering a hard look.
Why is zuck wearing a tie?
There is a solution to this problem which lets you have your cake and eat it to. Continued fractions give you a representation of real numbers that turns into a compact exact representation of all possible fractions. (If you've got a lazy language, like Haskell, you can compactly represent many real numbers as well.) Doing arithmetic with them is tricky, but possible.

If you're interested, http://perl.plover.com/yak/cftalk/ has all of the necessary details, including a sample implementation as a program in C.

I've never heard of anyone using that number system for serious work, but I'd be curious how well that would work out.
Google Apps add-ons for the enterprise
Download 200+ Free Exclusive guidesigner.net Icons, Designers resources.
Liberate my controller - Rails
I Have Got a Complaint about H1N1 | My Complaint
1Password 3.0 goes public beta with Snow Leopard support
Curious if you've read the book (I haven't) and why you think that an entire tribe of people where 70 year old men regularly run 30-50 miles is not "proof" in your eyes?
I strongly disagree that they're evil. I have had the book for about a decade, and while I consider myself a low-power individual - that is, unaggressive in pursuit of my goals - I've found it a great aid in understanding the dynamics of many situations, as well as knowing when someone is exercising a power play against me or trying to manipulate me in some fashion.

Sure, it's not '48 laws of harmony and cooperation'; I think it's a legitimate authorial technique to challenge the reader and push them out of their comfort zone - and yet the book is abundant with examples of how greed and hubris can lead to a sticky end. The book seems to generate strong reactions in a lot of people, both those like yourself who say it's evil and from others who say it's too wishy-washy (one hard-charging person I mentioned it to derided it as '48 laws of brown-nosing'). I wonder if you have read the whole thing? If not, why not borrow it from the library, saving yourself the emotional conflict over whether to enrich the author, and give it a full read.

The fact is that it's a competitive world, and attempts to improve upon human nature often turn out to have serious negative consequences; apparently benign beliefs such as christianity can become vehicles of horrid repression. Better, then, to improve the world by securing for yourself the freedom to do so in peace than by wishing away the facts of life.
I think the quote should be "lose your first 50 games as quickly and thoughtfully as possible."

Ideally, you are losing to progressively better opponents. This gives you the opportunity to ask for help and learn better technique as you are losing. Online Go is great because you can record your games and get others to critique them.

I love Go. I love that there are implied threats, feints, and sacrifices. I love that seemingly random moves can be so critical in later stages. Go is a game of experience. You really have to enjoy the process of unraveling the mystery of the game and not worry so much about winning.
It's interesting you assume I said that, but I did not. In PHP you can have all kinds of levels of abstraction (and I use a multitude of levels). It is just as interesting that you assume most levels of abstraction are not possible.

Your initial post called this "a waste of time". That is why I assumed you didn't do it. If you do do it and think it's a waste of time, you are probably doing it wrong, as the rest of the programming community disagrees with you.

Also, you have 100 line SQL statements embedded in your PHP programs? That is the wrong level of abstraction.

The point of my abstraction is that a quick one-liner is the same mental complexity as your supposed 100-line statement. The idea is that most of the complexity is abstracted away by specific names. You compose the specific names into something that ends up being physically complex, but mentally simple as you are reading your code.

Anyway, probably not worth arguing with you, since you are quick to make personal attacks, aren't consistent with your own ideals, and won't discuss anything specific. (Well, I guess you will discuss how many lines of code something is.)
I can't help but feel a tinge of enlightenment from reading his articles. Maybe not enlightenment, maybe....reinforcement. Thank you so much for posting this link.
I think the biggest role that a teacher plays is baby sitter. Through 12th grade, most of the class is there because they are required to be there. If you could write software that sends kids to detention, then you might have a good replacement.

Besides the social part, software probably could be a great way to teach some subjects. Human teachers still exist to fill non-educational roles.