skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have to agree here. The productivity gains are remarkable when one takes the time to think a little bit before typing, or learn more keyboard shortcuts for Emacs/Vim, or be able to apprehend a holistic view of the application and problem domain.

A second note: Emacs is the one piece of software that makes me the most productive.
There will always be a need for better programming languages, with the current situation making new languages more important than ever. We have computers we can't completely utilize at the moment and they're becoming more parallelized (and thus more difficult to work with, using current tools) by the second.

Despite the progress that's been made, computing is still a very young field and there's a whole lot of room to grow. We need better languages, better compiler technology, better kernels, better paradigms for handling tasks (processes and threads don't cut it), and above all else, we need new ideas.

If people aren't experimenting with new ideas, we won't move forward. While most of the implementations (literal implementations or specific language designs) will fail, the good ideas will carry on and support the next generation. We should all welcome innovation in this space, even if we don't like what's being created.
Not surprised, and agree. HN isn't covering a nice natural boundary of topics, it's trying to fit a group of people's ideas for interesting topics.

If and when it isn't doing that, said group of people should prune away the topics they don't want - otherwise it will grow into a general discussion site. Like pruning a shrub or guiding a vine. Yes, it's a bit dictatorial and a bit undemocratic, and that's fine because it's not a popularity contest trying to target the majority of people.

Often when googling for a problem and finding a result, there's a languishing forum post that goes

"problem" "irrelevant suggestion" "irrelevant suggestion" "unhelpful but well meaning comment" "me too" "answer"

and I wish someone had enough care to weed out the drivel.
A notebook and a set of habits (my processes). A simple paper notebook which I can write ideas down in meetings, which I can keep by my bedside and scribble down my thoughts if I get a brainstorm when I'm sleeping.
There have been a number of discussions.
All electronic tools I've used over the years (languages, software, gadgets) change and evolve and I have to port from one format to another. The consistent parts are the habits I've developed over time. Habits on note taking, organizing, question asking.
Idea for this site: up/down voting decrements ones karma points. It is not related with the concept of the karma, but we do not have live-span values here.
PeopleString
Never heard of him, Steve Roach does really awesome ambient music though...
The Internet Isn’t Killing Books (In Reality, It’s Probably Going to Create a..
Definitely Eclipse. The debugger is basically the most valuable feature ever developed. Ever.
http://faircompanies.com/
Linux/GNU/Unix (don't murder me, I do not know which one applies here):

grep, sed, awk, sort, uniq, shell scripts and pipes now do things in seconds that took me hours if not days to do with Windows GUI tools. Of course my experience plays a big part to that but I don't think that I would be were I am without those.
I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people.

I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.
I know Google likes long betas, but this is ridiculous.
Brilliant, thank you for the explanation and the Wikipedia link. I'm going to stop by the library this weekend to see if they have any books on compiler design, do you have any recommendations there?

Thanks again, its great to learn something new.
You could spend more time with your kids which make up tenfolds for the missing fancy stuff. Kids love attention and entourage. YOU should be their idol and YOU can compensate the "poor" education. I disagree that money buys good education. Between terms the parents are responsible for the education and development of the offspring and spending more time with your kids gives you better chances to pass on your values. You can't pay someone to do that for you while you're working for that money.

Follow your heart! I did that and led me to a low maintenance but very happy life. The less you have to more you gain.

Happiness == Success
It also has multiple return values.

As agl noted, it has iterators:
http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html#RangeClause
Pen and paper help, too.
I'm a little tired of all of the Microsoft bashing. Everyone copies from everyone else. Who cares if they admit it or not? If they are copying they should be copying from Compiz, not Apple.

"I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." -- Linus Torvalds
FarmVille: who knew boredom could be a cash crop?
At the cost of making the process much more painful for legitimate customers, while recovering only a very small number of lost hardware sales.

(And that's before you consider that people will just find a way to lift the OS image off an installed Mac and share it on the Internet, whereas today at least a lot pay for their copies.)
Unbound cache 
Please explain what is meant by "unbound cache" Thanks
Ratio's can be very misleading. I'd be more interested in seeing a chart with plots for Gold, DJIA, and then the ratio.
I like this article. It frames it as David vs. Goliath and looks very good for Psystar.
Don't own a TV.
Thank you, I will definitely do that.
Which would deprive his wife and children more?

a) Fewer expensive toys, a smaller/no TV, a small house, cheap clothes, and public school?

b) A father and husband so busy repressing his pain, so trapped in the anguish of seeing his identity drowned, that he cannot express his true love and strength to them?

His family will benefit infinitely more from the joy of his liberation, and his children from the example of a father fully passionate about his life and theirs. Anything less is a disservice - and the money is utterly inconsequential in comparison.
Yeah, this was a very uncritical puff piece. Psystar has been selling the open source stuff as their own, directly in violation of the APSL, etc. Here are some references:

http://netkas.org/?p=62
http://netkas.org/?p=310
""I shudder at the thought of HN turning into Slashdot, where know-it-alls feel the need to hijack any genuine religious feeling or discussion by injecting the latest anti-religion meme picked up from the intertubes."

And I shudder at the thought of HN turning into a place where appeals for advice are met by "Turn to $Diety, who watcheth over us all". That something may be believed with high conviction is not a measure of its truth or validity or appropriateness.

wrt

" any genuine religious feeling or discussion"

But that is the point. HN isn't the place for religious discussion or proselytizing, no matter how heartfelt or (subjectively) genuine the belief in its tenets is.

As with politics, these circle endlessly and go nowhere. There are plenty of other forums on the intertubez where people of specific convictions can exchange their beliefs (or delusions) to their hearts content.

Theology of any kind is a bad topic to bring up on HN. And any organized religion's theological minutiae are just as valid (or invalid) as discussion of the FSM, which is a device contrived to expose the subjective nature of such strongly held beliefs.

I have my beliefs about the nature of the Universe (it is irrelevant whether I am agnostic, atheist or religious), but I don't proselytize them here or try to gain converts by pivoting off peoples misery.

So no matter how "genuinely felt" your religious belief is, please don't pollute HN with it.
Restartable exceptions (a'la Lisp conditions) in Ruby
Well if you follow the second link you will find Adam Langley (one of the initial developers of Go) saying that the type system precludes a generic map, grep, etc.

You point out that everything implements the empty interface, but knowing that something implements the empty interface isn't very useful. A map, grep, etc needs to be passed a function and a bunch of data, then needs to apply the function to each piece of data. But the type system can't let you pass a piece of data to the function unless it knows the types are compatible. So if your function takes ints and adds them, then you really need to know that all of your pieces of data are ints. To use functions that accept data of other types, you will need a different version of grep for every type of function you accept.

This is exactly the problem that generics tries to solve.
Journalists, eh? At least they wrote the rest of the article well enough.
That's great news but about 5 years too late... I've long since weaned myself of the habit.
You seem to have lost perspective. Don't get caught in that. The easiest way to do that is to eliminate some of the stuff that is not really important. Such as being a top contributor to HN.

You have infinite number of options and many of them can be better in terms of lifestyle. Don't limit yourself to anything that is artificially imposed on you. Such as society rules, industry rules, etc. There are other societies, other locations, other industries, other people on this planet. You don't have to take anything for granted. Think about that. Take it easy for now. Don't take immediate action. Try to be wise. Slowly come up with a plan.
Private Company Valuations: Amyris Biotechnologies, Inc.
I truly learned how to learn by the end of college, and I would have found it invaluable to have learned it sooner. There is no doubt that I would have accomplished 100x more and learned 100x more during those years.
"all major platforms" - I must have missed it, where is the Windows version?

Or is the market-leading operating system not a major platform?
You've got yourself stuck in the Orange vMeme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics#Orange). You won't always be happy doing work for another person, maybe define a life purpose and mold everything around to that...
Well you're not alone... got a lot of commentary to this post, eh? My small datapoint that helps me to some degree at my moments of 'life dispair' is my 'hobby', a small sailboat. Just big enough to sleep in, it's not an expensive yacht, heck it cost $500 at an auction. But, what it does for me in this context is give a real 'out', I could theoretically climb on and head south, right, that wouldn't happen but it gives the mind a moment of escape. It's also my learning boat, for the round the world trip once the kid is out of college... That may happen. Hang in there, you'll find your way.
The Perfect Desktop - Mandriva One 2010.0 With GNOME
What is Acta and what should I know about it?
Think you don't want a date? You soon will. (because of the holidays)
30 Conversations on Design
agreed. a whiteboard helps, too!
Ambient Music, mostly http://www.hos.com
http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=4e9a5b0955321f15...
> It also has multiple return values.

Another point of dissimilarity: python has single return values (which may be tuples).

> it has iterators

I stand corrected, thanks.
Was it called 'go' back then? Or did they just search their archived servers to find anything dated so long ago no one could argue with them?
Just a guess: he may be referring to the belief that Mac OS X is more safe than Windows on the same PC for ordinary users.
I don't have time to write an essay about this now, and I'm not sure I'd be the right person to do so anyway, but here are some thoughts I believe to be relevant.

Real Information Theory, as opposed to Data Transmission Theory, has to take into account the receiver. The transmitter has to have a model of the receiver, and then devise the data that will transform the receiver according to the intent of the transmitter.

For example, if you're a mathematician and I talk about the topological space obtained by gluing the edge of a mobious strip to the edge of a disk being the same topological space obtained by identifying antipodal points of S^2, you'll know what I mean. If not, I have to explain further.

Similarly, a computer program can start with a top level description of your intent, and a competent programmer can then complete the steps.

But a computer is not a programmer. When you describe your algorithm in sufficient detail for a programmer, you haven't given enough information for someone who isn't a programmer. A non-programmer will look at what you've written and then say "How do I do that?" Thus you need further instructions.

So you might say "We sort this vector of numbers by picking one at random, scanning down the vector to separate into those that are smaller, equal and larger, then recurse." and a sufficiently skilled programmer who's never met the Quicksort can now implement it.

But there are details missing.

You programs should (perhaps) be arranged so that the main routine is sufficient for a very skilled programmer to complete. Each routine called then is sufficient for a slightly less skilled programmer to complete, and recurse.

The problem is that the terminating case is the computer, and not a programmer, or even a person. Thus the terminating case is a long way down.

Perhaps there is a language design that will bring the terminating case higher.
How to setup an Auto Response / Welcome Message to new twitter followers
Unfortunately, there is no native twitter way to send an auto response / welcome message to the new twitter followers. i hope twitter will be implement it in the near future.
Increasingly, mathematics. Not sure if that would be considered a "tool" for the purposes of this discussion.
Gotweet - command-line Twitter client in Go
A locally running version instance of issue tracking software. Use whatever you're comfortable with, but I go with JIRA; It costs $10 for a license for up to 10 people.

It helps me keep track of side projects. For a long time I had trouble remembering where to pick up a project and would get distracted by unimportant parts. JIRA helps keep that to a minimum and makes me feel more serious about them.

I even keep one project setup in it for personal stuff (renew passport, etc) just to keep all the TODOs in one spot, but whenever you tell people that they always make some wise-ass crack about using it to file a bug report about you personally...
Cambridge (UK) -> Sheffield (UK) -> Leeds (UK) -> London (UK) -> Berlin (Germany)
The future of business journalism: Pay for Play?
I think you explained it fine. If you sacrifice your dreams in the name of your children, and accept a dull life, the example you are setting is "sacrifice your dreams and accept a dull life". But presumably you don't actually want your kids to live that way, so the strategy is an unhappy contradiction.
I do a lot of data mining using Hadoop. Hive has become one of my tools of choice for SQL-ing large datasets.
Valgrind. If you are writing c/c++ but not using valgrind all the time, you are wasting time.
Typekit vs. Font Squirrel
* Bash shortcuts. Learn ^l, ^r, ^a, ^e, ^w, the substitution syntax (^one^two), bang commands (!cmd, !!, !!:0, !!:1, etc)

* Learn a good text editor well. I use vim, but learn whatever you feel comfortable in. Just make sure it doesn't stand in your way.

* Learn the core unix commands and use them often (tail, sort, uniq, tee, pushd/popd, etc)

* Use a configuration management tool (I use puppet, some people like cfengine, there's also chef)

* The second you see yourself doing something for the third time, script it (It goes without saying: learn a decent scripting language well)! Keep typing same long command? Alias or macro it. I can't stress this enough.

* Automate builds, tests and all doc generation. Don't repeat yourself. Use your downtime to reduce repetition. See what can be scripted.

edit:

* Keep everything in source control. Have a 'misc' repo and if you're starting to work on a script just to do some basic maintenance, add it to repo and keep it up to date. You never know when it will grow beyond a toy and you never know if you might break its functionality by messing with it.

edit2:

What really keeps me productive is liking the work I'm doing. Nothing else comes close.
Got a complaint? Don't get angry, get writing | My Complaint
Another possibility is to ask for a cut in your hours at work. That is what I have done, and it feels great. I was cut from 40+ hours to 30 hours by request, and now I use the extra time to work on side projects. When you find that you are earning more money in those extra 10 to 20 hours of side work than you are in the 10 hours you cut, it may be time to fully release yourself from the burden of a endless, meaningless job.
Study: Nine states risking California-style 'fiscal peril'
- Notepad++/Textpad/Emacs

- Python [You can write quick programs on the command line or use it as a calculator]

- ToDo List/Notes App running on the background.

- Multiple Desktop Windows(workspaces)

- Dual Monitors.
How to Deal with Skeletons in your Closet
plinkplonk: My post was made for no other reason but to answer lostsheep's honest questions with the only honest answer I have. I sincerely apologize for "polluting HN" with my honest thoughts. If I had seen that he added an email address to his account I would have just emailed him since I know most people here don't appreciate religious discussions.
Disagree. Comfort breeds complacency. Complacency breeds discontent.

My family was completely nomadic growing up. While it was kind of a constant uncertain adventure, I see, as an adult, how it made me a better and stronger person.

Look at people with a small zone of comfort, people who are so incredibly attached to their physical manifestations of "success" and they are some of the most unhappy people ever. Living the nomadic existence more or less teaches people to value their relationships with people over things or those things that 9-5 drudgery provides.

Besides, children are resilient. I would never trade the memory of the time with my parents & family -- moving, camping, learning and adapting all over the freaking place -- for memories of what most adults would call a "stable" childhood.
Looks like Go is forked from B?.
> And the third and most important reason of course, is that your moves have to be backed up by appropriate bets using your table stakes, exposing you to real risks and rewards

This is the most important line of the article, in my opinion.

First step to learning how to play this game is setting goals for yourself which will expose you to real risk if you were to try to achieve them in earnest.

In the tech world the most common place this sort of game is played out is the recruiter/engineer relationship. Spineless developers are favorite targets for sociopath recruiters. Next time one of them calls you, treat it like a game in which you are trying to dominate him or her.
Neat! Say hi to 'Unter den Linden' :)
Check out "The Money is the Gravy"

http://www.amazon.ca/Money-Gravy-John-Clark/dp/0446692689/re...

It may sound trite to suggest a self-help book but trust me - this book is different. My story is not that different from yours - I am in my early 40s, 3 kids, family depends on me financially, I have gone through some rough patches in my IT career. This book is a good starting point.

Cheers
Then what is killing books? It isn't magazines. It isn't newspapers. The writer's approach is interesting. Where it fails is in comparing any data on how many people have shifted to short-burst consuming against how many still read longer texts.
It seems like you're well qualified, and probably quite an asset to your company. It seems like you're frustrated with your current work/boss situation.

Maybe it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask for fewer hours, or some telecommuting time to be around your children?
Meh, I don't need another editor for linux, vim is enough for me.
Embedded Figures Test - Distinct Signature Emerges
Publicist work by another name. Appalling, but refreshingly direct in its cynicism.
Let's give some more credit to Microsoft. More than anyone else, they worked with 3D chip makers to ensure that we all have hardware capable of running the eye-candy we see in Windows 7, OS X, and Linux.

They were extremely late in releasing it to the public, so it looks like they copied other people, but from what I remember, they started working on it before everyone else did.
I don't consider the tests.py issue to be "part of using a framework" its just as bug. However solving the problem properly is a harder problem (right ow djangos app cache is a part of the orm, the right fix is to have a real app cache that doesn't kow about models, ad let the orm have its ow cache that just deals with models).
Two things: Emacs and pen-paper (yes, the old-fashioned paper notebook and a pen).

Eulogy follows:

Emacs has helped me eliminate software clutter. Seriously. Computer and software maintenance is a major productivity killer for me. Install this upgrade, update this app... I really hate that process, and even Mac OS does not hide it behind the scenes.

Emacs and org-mode helped me get rid of my mess of "productivity" apps, which also means less thinking about which app to use for what. It helps that Emacs just helps me bend text files into my thought flow, and I don't have to adapt to Productivity-App-Of-The-Day's model of anything. To-do lists go into an org-mode file. Latest thoughts about work can go into a an org-mode file. I can slice and dice them and write them as free-form or as organized as I want. It's immensely liberating. It helps that I don't have to worry about a proprietary file format biting the dust.
"My post was made for no other reason but to answer lostsheep's honest questions with the only honest answer I have. "

I never questioned the strength of your conviction in your beliefs, just the appropriateness of expressing them here. My post could have been less strongly worded, though. I apologize unreservedly for any offense caused by the sharpness of my tone.

" If I had seen that he added an email address to his account I would have just emailed him"

I agree this would be the correct action to take.

Cheers,
Will Apple's History Repeat?
Nano Technology
I'm suprised how little disscussions there are on the topic of Nano Technology, The Germans thrive on it and are far advanced on its future uses then the U.S It's future impications are just mind boggeling!
hahaha, B -> C -> ANSI C -> GO Spec :)
Really good headphones. Not necessarily noise-canceling but the more environmental noise they block the better.
Hint: Look at the name that checked in the 1972, 1974, and 1988 entries.
I don't, but I don't have kids. Do you?
I think it is natural. Doing anything for too long no matter how interesting turns it in to drudgery.
Reddit launches self-serve ad tool (buy a sponsored link for as little as $20)
Please stop using these tags
Saying that you paid Apple for the Mac OS license is laughable. Mac OS license is not a separate product. The price for the license is 29$ only because Apple considers it an upgrade for the Mac computer you have already bought from Apple. Mac OS upgrade is a bonus and only Mac owners are qualified.
> but full-time "normal" employment works for me

Never forget that someone else's ambition is what allows for your relative stability.
The spread on Gold American Eagles is currently 1.02% at apmex.com. That's better than most atm transactions :)
Can someone explain to me what I'm looking at? I don't get what this is, or it's significance? It is a joke of some kind?
50 Best Inventions of 2009
It's "lone wolf" vs "sheep herd", but you'd think that the loneliness of the lone wolf would be a solved (or non-) problem.