skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also have to wonder if Google moves a little faster when high-profile Microsoft employees are involved

I would imagine that they move quickly when high-profile employees of any (tech) company are involved, not just Microsoft. Being a big competitor to Google pretty much by-definition means that they will have a few high-profile people who leave regularly. I'm sure the same pattern is true of Google picking up ex-Yahoo employees.
The purposes of financial instruments (like debt and equity) are to replace these sorts of inefficient transactions.
> Readability is relative. Java is unreadable to my grandmother. Turkish is unreadable to me. In other words, the opinion of someone who hasn't learned a language regarding its readability is irrelevant.

What a gem!

I should start a collection of those, every now and then you get these things you can just frame and look at three times a day here.
How to make twitter DMs suck less
A recommendation for best practices in direct messaging from third party twitter applications.
The premise of the article wasn't that you shouldn't use Unicode. It was that you need to care about more than just Unicode. Thinking that the answer to localisation is to "just use Unicode" is a flaw in people's thinking that this article points out and corrects.

I'm curious as to why you believe UTF-8 is the only encoding you should use? I know of at least one person that says you should use UTF-16, because then it's immediately obvious when a certain piece of data is in the wrong encoding, whereas with UTF-8 you need to look for non-Latin characters (or accents) to distinguish it from, for example, ISO-8859-1. That line of thinking holds some value to me. Why do you believe otherwise?
Ubuntu: comes with Emacs, Apache, OpenOffice, Ruby, Erlang, Python, Java, the Gimp, Firefox, git... pretty much everything you need to set up and run your business, although the accounting software needs work. And it's all completely free and open source. How cool is that?
We got into this "downturn" because too many people borrowed too much, as well as too many lenders being less than careless about who they loaned money to. Failing to fix the incentives to borrow will only make this stuff happen again and again until there is no more economic system left to abuse.

Too many companies are issuing bonds to repurchase stock. And they're not doing it for valid business reasons: they're doing it to puff up their stock prices so that the CEO and Board can get their bonuses - and the vast majority of bonuses at that level are based on stock prices.
The fellow he is going to work for, Vic Gundotra, was a long-term Microsoft guy, and so it would seem that he was aware of Don and worked quickly to snap him up.
I half agree. I think a minimialist toolkit would be nice, but I think tk is beyond minimalist into the austere. Also, I think that both are fashion statements -- even if the statement is "I choose not to participate".
Oh, I think you're way off base on that. Google is far more congruent with the startup community than MS is. Just to mention one example, look at the differences in how they relate to open source (and the web itself for that matter). No doubt much of this relates to their origins. Google is the very prototype of the hacker startup that goes all the way.

Google's large-company-ness no doubt slows it down in a zillion ways, but there are still profound differences here (just as I'm sure there are between MS and, say, Oracle).
It's sort of interesting how unicode solved your problem, but totally ignored the exact same problem in east asia. It's still not possible to have a single unicode text file with japanese and chinese kanji in it. The official unicode answer is to not use plain text; use a rich text format that allows the specification of fonts instead. I sort of think unicode would be a much better global standard if it hadn't tried to merge the different kanji used by over a billion people.
> Do you mean Microsoft didn't mean to give Don Dodge any power?

I think he became more significant than his official title, and they failed to realize that during their planning and layoffs.
You can also do it from Observers, but I tend to agree that doing it from the model, as a callback, seems the cleanest, more idiomatic way.
SEO and brand awareness boosted by targeted business blog content
First universal programmable quantum computer unveiled
I initially thought recursion where less cpu intensive than traditional for-loops. Is this even true?
NYC Venture Capital War
It's more readable than Perl :-P
<obligatory anti jeff attwood comment>
Notice that "Evangelist" in his job title??? Yeah he's doing his job.
Well, the "danger" is that if this is a money making product, it suddenly would become a money loser, as you won't be able to sell it anymore. And that becomes a "danger" in a businessman's model of the world because it is a clear and present danger to the health and survivability of their company.

> apparently subcontractors can put chunks of code in to microsofts main distributions without proper oversight

Microsoft, like most companies, has been hiring too many contractors instead of FTE. While this gets spun as a "contractor out of control" it isn't a contractor out of control, it is a business model out of control.
> I compiled my Emacs without gtk+ support

I guess with these three lines in my .emacs

(menu-bar-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(scroll-bar-mode -1)

this wouldn't make much of a difference for me?
(honest question)
Look at when the account was created. It's just a spammmer.
What I find incredible is that this guy is just now discovering Gmail and Google Docs. Wow.
I always thought that Focault's Pendulum was a kind of highbrow Illuminatus! Trilogy
I bet this is the last time Microsoft tries to have someone do what Don Dodge does -- it must suck for him to enumerate all the Microsoft products he only used (touted?) because they paid him to do it.

If I worked at Google, I would really reconsider this -- how will it look if Zoho makes him an offer next?
The connotation is still "We cut costs, he was a cost," not "He was not doing his job well enough." Although obviously needing to cut costs can clarify which costs are worth it.
Spammers don't usually post with their full real name linking to their twitter page.
ctrl-mouse-left or whatever it is will still pull up a gtk menu, which looks a bit nicer. Also, it's possible, via various routes, to get file dialogs that are gtk.

I get rid of the tool bar and scroll bar too, but do leave the menu bar, as once in a while it's nice for fishing around for things I don't use often. Basically though, I just want as much screen real estate for code as possible.
LEGO minifig patent (1979)
Limiting the use of the resource will happen one way or another, whether is through government control or mother nature not providing us more fish.

Pretending that eating less fish is going to make a difference in the long term is ignoring the fact that most people aren't going to follow your advice. Consumption of expensive foods is growing around the world, so if demand for fish is lowered in North America, that will drive down the price and allow people in poorer countries to consume more fish, resulting in an economic equilibrium.

The best thing we can have is very high domestic demand for fish, which will bring large earnings to the domestic fishing industry, and motivate them to secure their livelyhoods in the long term by pressuring the government to take action against less ethical foreign fisheries.
An Intro to Communicating Sequential Processes
Ah yes, thanks. Kindle slipped my mind. It makes sense now.

Kindle does have a potential to become a walled-garden ecosystem reminiscent to Apple. There's nothing Kindle wants more than to become an iPod of books and will very likely curb the Web experience on Kindle to suit its business needs.
I really like his approach to teaching JS, but I wish he would finally finish his "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" book.
If I recall correct, I pre-ordered this book almost 2 years ago, when it had a release date of a few months later.
Well, the "danger" is that if this is a money making product, it suddenly would become a money loser, as you won't be able to sell it anymore.

How does this follow from anything? There's nothing about the GPL that says you can't sell your product. This has happened before; a Japanese game used Xvid a while back for its videos and included the GPL Xvid decoder in the binary (stupidly, since there are better LGPL equivalents anyways). They got called on it and released the source of the game--but did anyone care? I highly doubt that it hurt sales--everyone who was going to pay for it probably still paid for it, and everyone who was going to pirate it probably still pirated it.
Wikipedia doesn't entirely agree with you:

"Both horizontal and vertical writing are used in Japan, as well as in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan where the Traditional Chinese orthography is used. Traditional Chinese is also used in mainland China in a few limited contexts, such as some books on ancient literature, or as an aesthetic choice for some signs on shops, temples, etc. In those contexts, both horizontal and vertical writing are used as well.

Vertical writing is commonly used for novels, newspapers, comics, and many other forms of writing. Because it goes downwards, vertical writing is invariably used on the spines of books. Some newspapers combine the two forms, using the vertical format for most articles but including some written horizontally, especially for headlines. Musical notation for some Japanese instruments such as the shakuhachi is written vertically."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing...

But I agree that you don't really have to worry about that. Just as we're lucky not to have to worry about this monstrosity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
This is what I mean by 'marketing problem': here we have an article describing how Tk can be themed, that links to a page showing more of same ( http://wiki.tcl.tk/24094 ) and it's 'austere' ? I think the idea of "Tk as old and ugly" is so ingrained that it will be very difficult to root out:-/
I think lists are simply more conversational.

If I write a thousand word essay on why CITIZEN KANE was an important, pivotal, but largely unwatchable film - very few people are going to read it to the end. And the style and the nature of my arguments will select out huge audiences. Those who remain to link or discuss what I've written will be of a pretty narrow group.

But if I just post "Top 10 Important Films I Can't Stand to Watch" and include CITIZEN KANE, it invites any number of conversations at various levels-of-depth. The potential audience is far, far larger and the territory open to discussion is vast.
It's only natural that you use the software of the company for which you work. When at Microsoft, you use Microsoft products. When at Google, you use Google products. Of course, any tech person with a blog who made a switch from one suite to the other would write about how the change felt and whether it was for the better or the worse. I don't find anything sinister about it.

Plus, his points ring very true. I care about technical merit, not who is paying Don's salary - which means that if Don is right about a Google product being better in some way, I don't care if he's drawing a Google salary at the time he says it.
the title was good though
I think the point is DHH's 2 cents about emails being more like views, thus under responsibility of controllers.
The original (Zalgo'd) version of the StackOverflow answer is even funnier than Jeff's excerpt: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
OK, this is a mess. Lets try to get some new coolness metrics here.

A. Number of lines of assembler it compiles to

B. Time it took you to write it (no cheating)

C. Number of symbols used (with names being one symbol)
The challenge is that these new features drive a bill that your customer sends to their customer. I am a little surprised by this response to problems that could undermine your customer's business relationships.

I am also surprised that none of your current customers would give feedback or comments on how the release worked for them: why not just deploy it to current customers who want to use it (since it's appears to be free to them) and make this announcement after you have had more than a week's testing? Or was that also a joke?

You should consider appending the "jump" sentences (e.g. "jump into a new feature...") to your announcement blog post so that new visitors are aware of your approach to developing and delivering software.
Well, if Google fires Don then may be Zoho will make him offer next week?
Here are a few links my host gave me when i ran into the same problem:
http://www.tech-faq.com/source-code-security-vulnerabilities...
http://www.fortify.com/landing/extra/ppc_source_code.html?so...
http://sectools.org/
Apple tablet: The (supposed) everything killer
This quote in his article was funny: "I realized immediately that the exhibition would focus on lists. Why am I so interested in the subject? I can't really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences."
I'm just glad somebody got my point. It seems so obvious, yet it must not be, because the contrary is much more common. It especially bears repeating in the context of a largely undiscovered gem like K.
The Chinese newspaper I usually read is top to bottom, left to right. So are the vast majority of the other newspapers and magazines on the rack, the last piece of fiction I bought and my book on go. I also encounter a good number of MS word documents, including contracts printed that way.

That said, top to bottom is just too much of a pain to deal with on the web until CSS supports it.
Though I'm sure he feels bitter now, his post makes me think of the phrase 'don't burn bridges'. You never know what the future will hold.
RescueTime guys, your reaction to criticism is immature. You are shutting down the feedback channel that has fallen into your laps - think what will happen after this process is complete. I urge you to reconsider your approach.
Security considerations for virtual environments
Ok, but the way it's written up, it's not very effective due to the fact that he's being paid by the company whose products he is now so enthusiastically embracing.

I think it would look a little bit more genuine if there were a thing or two he missed, or something he's ditching for a product that doesn't just happen to be a Google product.

The real news item is not "Google employee uses Google products", but that Google is hiring a guy that seems to be well regarded and that MS, for whatever reason, let go, which most commentators seem to indicate was a smart move for Google and a dumb one for MS; but I guess he can't really say that himself without coming across badly.
Anorexia nervosa
Certain browsers leak memory like mad when you use closures. The libs bind functions usually account for that and do the necessary cleanup.

Plus, the jQuery "bind" function is necessary so you can keep chaining methods.
What safe investment pays 10%?

i use lendingclub.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lending_Club

during less severe economic times you could also make around 10% via high yield savings accounts
Which still doesn't make it a good idea.
before you have a solid ontological understanding of a concept, lacking powerful descriptive axioms we're forced to rely on a list of characteristics e.g. intrinsic properties, how it interacts with other objects, etc. if we restrict ourselves to things we already have a vigorous understanding of how will we consider new hypothesis?

I'm not sure if this is coming through right.
Does anybody know how to change that "Tk" in the upper left corner? I find it garish, and a distraction from the content.

Using matplotlib for Python 2.5 on XP. I don't think there's any way to get the window handle to send it a WM_SETICON and besides, it would be best to use a native Tk call.
Some of these were already revolutions. For example, i was in a large enterprise organization when Java came out. The programmers there were using Cobol, cics, Powerbuilder, maybe a little Eclipse, some Lotus Notes. The excitement of the programmers was palpable. They held impromptu meetings, made plans. Lots of excitement. Management wasn't so keen, however.

Smalltalk was a revolution as well. It was the first visible OO push. It even made Business Week with some of the technologies.

So some of these peak then fade.
If I remember correctly, a big change is that the pseudocode more closely resembles syntax of modern languages.
>> This doesn’t happen. The object is unchanged when you call array.slice.

You're wrong. Why don't you check instead of reading API docs or saying what you think should happen? It obviously is changed, and is a new object:
Array.prototype.slice.call({0:"hello",1:"world",foo:"bar",length:2});

Results in ["hello","world"] - the result is a completely new object - inefficient wasted effort. Both in cpu and memory.

Offtopic again, but here's an interesting way to make a new N element array, initialized with undefineds...

Array.prototype.slice.call({length:100}) = [undefined, undefined, undefined........ undefined]

Array.prototype.slice.call({length:10000000}) takes almost 1 second to run on my MBP while it's creating that new array.

>> What’s the alternative?

As I say, just write closures...

onclick = function(c){return function(){c.doSomething()}}(this);

It's not much more typing, and is more general. I agree arguments would be nicer if it was a true array though.
Great. Posix threading (via libray) doesn't work for C or C++. I presume that's true for Cthreads and Solaris threads, too. Why don't we see more problems in practice? I mean, I've done lots of threaded programs, and experienced lots of problems, but the problems have been 100% related to mistakes or inadequate conceptualizing of thread interactions. I've never run across something that "should work", but doesn't.
Though I'm sure we all know of situations where "layoffs" are used to get rid of problem employees because it's easier than a termination for reason.
There's a subtle but important difference between "the market isn't ready" and "there is no market".
Given my life expectancy as a male, there's a 50% chance I won't regret anything by then.
My thoughts about Tk:

1. I think buttons with relief are easier to use, but other than that I am always surprised at how worked up people get about theming (but then I prefer a terminal based emacs...).

2. Tcl/Tk has some GREAT ideas that are not implemented anywhere else: the built-in event handler, trivial to write callbacks, and the everything is a string philosophy (which is strangely like a self-evaling lisp approach)

3. Tcl/Tk had some really bad luck. This weekend at opensqlcamp, someone asked Selena Deckleman why PostgreSQL has not had a tenth the market share as MySQL. She said (paraphrasing): in 1999 a lot of the core devs thought the internet was just a fad -- whoops... Same mistakes maybe happened with Tcl/Tk -- it was there just a little too early.

4. Tcl/Tk demands C to be a really full platform, and C is scary to a lot of the new breed of scripters.
You know, 7 lines or not, name your goddamned variables. I'd fire someone who presented me with code like this.
You do lay off at that level if there's a mis-match between what a company is wanting and what the person was hired to deliver.

If Microsoft's "evangelist" roles are changing, it makes sense to dismiss those folks who previously worked towards those old objectives, since those objectives are no longer being targeted.

One is 'fired' due to incompetence. Another is 'laid off' due to a change in company priorities, direction and resource allocation.
See http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/11/parsing-html-in-python-with.... and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923775 .
Btw, as someone that has sometimes parsed html using regular expressions (for small and localized html snippets extracted by bigger pages) and has dealt with the numerous patches needed everytime something changes (structural changes or random \n,\r,etc... added to the source html ), i definitely agree that a html/xhtml parser is the way to go.
The resulting implementation will be cleaner and the typical issues will be adressed slightly changing the parsing code or fixing bugs in the html cleaning/validator section of the parser...
Aptera Founders Ousted in Boardroom Showdown
Still reading through this interview but this is fast becoming one of my favorites. I love this tidbit:

Bezos: We were packing these things, everybody in the company and I had this brainstorm as I said to the person next to me, "This packing is killing me! My back hurts, this is killing my knees on this hard cement floor" and this person said, "Yeah, I know what you mean." And I said, "You know what we need?" my brilliant insight, "We need knee pads!'" I was very serious, and this person looked at me like I was the stupidest person they'd ever seen. I'm working for this person? This is great. "What we need is packing tables."
Go: Fibonacci Calculator (using channels and go routines)
A Fibonacci calculator written in Go that makes use of channels and go routines to do the calculations. It's well documented and easy to follow, as to help others get their feet wet with Go.
it should be formatted to be easier to read.
Very cursory examination shows no goroutines, lots of talk about Objects (not in go) and a dynamic appearance. I would say no.
Blogger craped up my formatting, I am not a regular poster, but will improve on it though. But I am looking for some comments on content. Anything which might help me improve
And a browser other than Internet Explorer!
I'd fire someone who presented me code from the IOCCC (http://www.ioccc.org/) as well. That's entirely beside the point. The point of code like this is that it is short - other things can and will be sacrificed.

Edit: It's like complaining that the Mona Lisa is a crappy painting, because you are insistent on looking at it as if you were a cubist. It's completely missing the point.
I took some pretty detailed notes while I was there for anyone that's interested:

http://www.mattmazur.com/2009/10/notes-from-startup-bootcamp...

Enjoy --
I worked at a K shop last summer, and when I was learning the language, I tried using sensible variable names. I was told in no uncertain terms that, when you write K, local variables should be one letter, globals should be two, and functions should be three.

It sounds like a total disaster, but after about two weeks (which is a long-ass time to learn a language), everything made perfect sense, and I really enjoyed using it for the rest of the time. It's very powerful and fast to execute, and after you get the hang of it, it's fast to write, too.
I deleted my above comment because it was redundant to Tony's.

I think you're misinterpreting. We're not badly reacting to criticism, it's just surprising seeing that the tone here has seemingly changed from being one that used to be receptive to and encouraging of rapid progress and user-driven product development. The reason we launched these features to the broad audience was so they could be used and we could have feedback submitted. The reason I posted the blog post here is because this community is one that likes to try out the cutting edge things that are out there and frequently tend to post useful feedback.

I felt like the tone of the earliest comments was overly harsh, considering the above. This was always intended to be a soft-launch. I thought it would be a good idea to involve the HN community in it. Sincere apologies if this wasn't communicated better. Lesson learned.

Please, we want your involvement and your feedback, but in no way was this launched prematurely. This is the way we've always operated and we're proud of the product we've been able to develop because of it.