skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cold war was a very complex thing. To understand it completely you really need to go back to mid-19th century ideology.

I can't summarize it in a few hundred words. If I could then my point would be invalid! Suffice it to say that the voluntary parts of the non-aligned countries were based just as much on the use of soft and hard powers, ideologies, and internal political disputes as some overall narrative.

I don't mind simplification and the use of analogies. And I agree that in the long run the natural democracy of the populace will win out, no matter what the system. But to say that somehow these countries were acting in the same sense as a person acts when they go to vote is really taking the broad brush a little too much, I think.

Ideally you use analogy to illustrate a point or to carry an idea further. When you just throw it out there, mid-essay, it shows that you're taking a lot of shortcuts in your thinking. Shortcuts that may not be justified upon closer inspection.
I love your use of <weak> there. I know it's a joke, but I would find it useful as a real HTML tag.

There are certain things on the page that are less important than a regular <p> or <li>. It would be nice to add some semantic meaning to the article rather than only making the color lighter in the stylesheet.
You've probably had 20 other people tell you about this; but switching to a tiled window manager will remove that whole 'careful placement of windows' thing from your life in a very positive way.
Google image search is a good start, but why pay humans, surely it wouldn't be hard to write a pattern matcher that could differentiate between male and female photos.

Google image search could also allow for breaking down the results by geo-location.
I think what you meant was that there is a huge gap between spoken languages and programming languages, feature wise.

To make the argument more convincing, don't use English. The grammar is ambiguous. Lojban, a created language, is not. It is being used as a spoken language (though it's not very popular yet). Still, it is being used very differently from a computer program in a fundamental way.

One of the major issues is the concept of object definitions. Object-oriented languages have a very specific meaning for what an "object" is, while spoken languages do not. Rather than creating a specification for what data and functions an object contains, spoken languages group objects by properties. Ambiguity aside, it's a problem of whether you're defining it top-down, or bottom-up. Prototypes are closer to the way we use language for object definitions, but it's still not quite the same.

Another issue is how the language is used. A random portion of the source code is completely non-sensical to a computer, while a random paragraph of a book can still be meaningful. The portion of the source code could make sense to a programmer, maybe enough to reconstruct enough of it, but no computer can process it.

So, to go back to the original point, programming languages and spoken languages are both supposed to convey ideas. Spoken languages do a much better job, hands down. OP used length as a rough measure, but the idea is valid. The question is how can we make computers understand spoken languages in a meaningful way. Answer that, and you'll have a better programming language.
While I agree that HTML is acceptable, I personally have never seen how it's better than XHTML.

XHTML definitely makes life easier for the browser vendors, and if they spend less time debugging their HTML parsing engines then they can spend more time adding CSS3 support!

From the coder's perspective, is it really that much harder to write XHTML than plain HTML? Personally I find writing HTML more of a hassle, but that's just because I use XHTML on a daily basis...
This is largely a case of lack of information; I don't think the city of Coshocton knew that it wasn't accountable for actions of its users. It blows my mind that one illegal movie download can have such ramifications.
If you had your own AS number, couldn't you multihome your address space with BGP, and still update the IP on the other machine if the other machine fails?
VentureHacks: How to Pick a Co-founder
An Agilist In the Rough (Using Agile in a non-Agile Environment)
I would be very interested in this if Reddit were chock to the brim of positive, technically disinclined females who enjoy commercial messages and spend money on software.

CTRs do not make advertising successful. Conversions make advertising successful. Your users, when they're in Reddit mode, "consume" links at a prodigious rate and are primarily engaged in interaction with Reddit rather than interaction with the links. Conversions from them are, for most businesses, going to be too low to measure. On the other hand, conversions from AdWords are fairly predictable, because if you're doing it right you are guaranteed to be speaking to someone who wants what you're selling.

Advertising is not a magic "pennies fall from heaven" game -- at the end of the day, somebody actually has to buy something. When you cultivate an audience of rapidly anti-commercial poor adolescents, you end up with the only remaining advertisers being the sort of autoplay flash infection vectors, because scams are the only business model that works profitably.
It sounds like a great idea, but I've been lurking around Reddit for the last couple of years and many people there don't want to pay for anything and are anti-corporate in general.

This seems like it will benefit reddit more than the people placing ads.
10 buildings inspired by the natural world
I find it interesting, that as far as I can tell, only a couple people said "previous co-worker".
Tinkering (Hacking) Makes Comeback Amid Crisis
Yea, I do see your point, but I reacted to the harshness of your tone. Minus the sharpness of how you expressed it, I mostly agree with the content of what you expressed.
Templates can be centralised just as well as stylesheets.
Hong Kong is perhaps the best modern case study of relatively free capitalism in action. In just a quarter of a century, a poor country with few natural resources raised its standard of living above that of the UK, its colonial parent.

There's an old story that once, in a meeting, Milton Friedman was chastising Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary, for not collecting the economic statistics that Milton and other economists wanted. Cowperthwaite replied that the omission was intentional; he knew that if he collected the data, the bureaucrats back in the UK would see the numbers and expect him to do something about them.
This has made it very clear that, for me, happiness is a fundamentally internal thing. Your outside circumstances (within reason) have only marginal effects on happiness.

I agree with your take on happiness; it is fundamentally a matter of frame of mind.

However, the inputs to one's frame of mind evaluates can have a significant effect on happiness. It depends partly on how your brain was/is wired, and a significant amount on deciding which inputs to take seriously and how to relatively weight them.

I haven't spent a full week at a strength in quiet deep uninterrupted thought, but I probably do over the course of a year or two (approximately, I don't really keep track of time when I'm thinking). Part of this thinking is looking into my frame of mind, seeing how things are wired together based on snap judgments I've made in the past, and seeing if there are places where I am weighting things wrong, or even places where I should just start discarding input entirely. I guess, in a sense, you could say I'm performing back-propagation on my mind. :-)

kids have a way of totally ignoring the bullshit they're supposed to see, and just seeing instead.

My wife is the same way, and it is absolutely wonderful. She's a great source of insight when my frequent introspection runs into a difficult, deep problem. That she does the same sort of mental self-analysis often means she and I have non-overlapping insights about things. It helps me spend less time in a state of confusion.

Really good advice overall, though. Kudos.
Interesting that while the article mentions TechCrunch's crusade, it never mentions the problematic aspect, which are the scammy offers. The article only mentions buying virtual goods as a problem. I'd say scamming is worse.
A computer not connected to the Internet.
It's actually a pretty cute game, and addicting if you're into sim games. Micropayments for games are nothing new, though, and thankfully optional (although always tempting).

You can snap out of the addiction though, if you stop for a minute and count how many clicks are required every time you have to harvest - plow - plant a big sized field in a 20x20 (or more) farm. RSI, anyone?
Decade in review: How the Internet ruined everything
The fact that very few types of writing actually work well in book format? I've written a novel: It takes a lot of work and a lot of effort to make one, and it's very hard to write one without padding it. Most things novels deal with can be dealt with better in movie/short story/blog format. Just because we as a society don't appreciate how niche books are doesn't mean books aren't niche.
UltraEdit is my favorite editor on Windows, which is why I was pretty happy to see it being made available for Linux. It is true that being closed source will make it difficult to succeed on Linux, but it's a good sign nonetheless. The website mentions that a Mac version is coming soon, which should be interested -- at least in comparison to TextMate.
I can relate to what you are going through, and feel like I'm going through something similar.

The main difference is that I've tried a couple things to change course, and have met with some failures already. This has been discouraging, and I think I need to step back and re-assess some more. Some of the discouragement I feel is due to some misplaced priorities, I'm starting to realize. I should value time with my family, health, and just appreciating what life has to offer more than some outward notions of "success." I'm not the best in the world at what I do to make money, and I'm definitely better than some other people, and that's OK. But it is not the only important part of who I am. My wife has been trying to point this out to me, and it is slowly starting to sink in.
TextMate for mac

Django for framework
Clutter-free link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125798004542744219.html?mod=...
Like most things in life, advertising and having a bully pulpit will promote a language beyond its merits. The Sun / Java example is a good one.
I made a gadget to monitor my message queues
One approach that has helped me get some perspective in situations when my mind is churning out negative thoughts and feelings such as you are experiencing is a cognitive behavioral approach based on mindfulness. Try having a look at http://thehappinesstrap.com .
And that someone is getting an (arguably) fair slice of the value you produce in exchange for it. What's the problem?
Are you saying the recruiters manipulate developers into working for them?
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I'm sorry if religion does not gratify your intellectual curiosity, but the grandparent post was genuinely on topic and may gratify the curiosity of any hacker who is interested in religious feelings.

Notice that I didn't say anything about my religious beliefs, or whether I even have them, yet you seem to be making assumptions about what they are. Furthermore, though you claim you don't want HN to have religious debates, there was no religious argument until you started posting.

It looks as though you define a forum free of endless religious flames as a forum where everyone believes the same way you do, or else is silent about it. I say "looks as though" because I would hesitate to accuse anyone directly of holding such a deplorable position--and it should be obvious to any of what pg called the "intellectually curious" why such a position is so deplorable.

If HN is to be free of religion-targeted flames, why are you posting religion-targeted flames? If you want HN discussions not to be motivated by religious conviction, why do you try to effect its presence?
Microsoft rebukes employee or saying Windows 7 was inspired by OS X
More of a successor than a fork, since Ken Thompson is the creator of B and is also on the Go team. :)
Sure. I can get to the DC, Philly or NY events and am considering joining.
From the article: "In fact, FarmVille isn't really a game at all. It's an online hobby, and has far more in common with knitting or gardening than a first-person shooter."

It has this mostly in common with The Sims. Most people don't want to play games. (Make something people want.)
The easiest way I've found for communication outside is with the ethernet shield. I have some motion sensors that phone home to a central server via a network connection and it works very well. I used a wall wart for those.
How HAMs got me started in computers and electronics
Right now, Intel can easily maintain their position on products alone -- the only place AMD can compete is on the low end, and even there Intel can cut prices to where AMD just can't compete if Intel feels like it.

All the anticompetitive stuff happened when AMD genuinely had the better product, and until that happens again, I doubt anything will happen to Intel's position.
> As for libraries, this is becoming less and less of an issue. With .NET and the JVM, you have a single set of libraries that works with any compatible language and allows language designers to focus on what they're good at: the language.

Yes, the language does't have to come with its own libraries. It can piggy-back on some other libraries. If there was just one operating system. with a good and stable API the language might not need any libraries, just the ability to make system calls. So for .NET and java, Sun and Microsoft already did the hard work as far as library code is concerned so any language on those platforms is already miles ahead of a new lanuage without any "batteries".

Interestingly enough, if an API is stable and well designed, a language could be created to take a better advantage of it. I am currently looking at Vala, it basically started as a better language than C that would take advantage of glib.
Yeah, sites like this get under my skin. Virtually every project I work on involves CSS. I've had trouble with "CSS Designers" lately.

- "CSS Designer" integration projects take 2-3x as long. I get blamed because it "looked great" as a static site.

- It's hard to debug "bad" CSS. (ex: too many "special cases".)

- CSS designers make very attractive sites.

- It's easy to have CSS conflicts when two programs share a page.

- CSS drop down menus are great!
Git, or any distributed source control software. Even when you are working solo, it helps to have something like git
It's actually fairly simple. I used the analog pins, and the sensors were just a circuit with a resistor that would be bypassed by the water. I used the 5V pin on the Duemilanove board to put power through the circuit, and then hard coded the numbers from the analog pins into the main loop.

I would have done a simple setup that allowed the water to close the circuit, but the sensors are very sensitive, and would react to my hand being near them when there was no circuit. I don't know enough about electronics to explain why...

As far as communication goes, I have a simple LED setup, with rows of 5 LEDs indicating the water level.
I continue to not be particularly excited by Go. My first thought when reading this code was "wow, that's a lot of verbosity mixed with a lot of line noise". If this was Some Random Guy's project, nobody would have heard of it and nobody would care. But since Google is paying for it, it's suddenly amazing? No exceptions? Seriously?

If you want a better system programming language than C, why not use Haskell? If it is better than Go in perhaps every measurable way. And there is already an HTTP library that supports basic auth...
I completely understand how you feel. I've been there.

I think a key takeaway from that article, that the author didn't get around to stating explicitly, is that for a 'sociopath', _everything_ is a negotiation. Everything. In fact, all of Powertalk is subtle positional negotiation hidden in everyday language. (For the security research-minded, I think a helpful metaphor might be covert channel information attacks/information passing).

If Powertalk is negotiation, then learning how to actually negotiate might help. Luckily, there are hundreds if not thousands of books written on the subject. _Negotiation Genius_, by Malhotra, _Bargaining for Advantage, by Snell, and _Negotiating Game_, by Karrass are all seminal works. I've found them helpful.

(Note that these books are usually written from the perspective of someone trying to sell a thing or a service. It takes a bit of a mental leap to figure out how to apply these strategies to the rest of life, but if you're intelligent enough to be a reader of Hacker News, I'm sure it won't be that hard.)
I guess I'm not sure what the real value in implicit interfaces is. If I can define any number of interfaces on a type (as it is in most (all?) compiled languages), why does it really matter? By forcing an explicit declaration of an interface implementation, it actually adds to the ability to understand the type relationships in a program. Is there something I'm missing?
Most of the time, yeah. The margins are massive. Most developers are terrible negotiators who roll over for $40-75/hour (and think they are getting a great deal), when recruiters and consulting firms routinely charge their clients $150+/hr on the back end. It's pretty easy to see why the word "loser" is used in the article to describe these people.
"And, yes, Korea's south prospering while the north stagnated was also a cautionary example to the rulers of China." --- but not to the North Koreans, it seems.
Nothing you do will make you happy so changing job (or wife or anything else you name it) doesn't help that much. Everyone suffered the same feeling as you do at one point or another. The question is are those thoughts real? How can you handle it when they arise?
A 2x Faster Web
What we really need instead is a visibility:blink; CSS property. ;)
Real Diamonds Google Hosted Projects
As Shipping Slows, Banks and Carriers Fear Loan Defaults
Cdecl (C gibberish to/from English)
By "Erlang", I assume you mean Haskell.
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A project by ridiculous_fish (his announcement: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2009/11/12/cdecl/)

Even though this should be familiar to anyone who spent any time with K&R.
Ask HN: Lets talk stats
We all know a good metrics driven analytic tool can be the backbone to any web business. What are some good tools that you use to learn, analyze and optimize your traffic and leads?
Javascript Madness by Jan Wolter
The classic is the "Dragon Book":

http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Alfred...

I'm also partial to Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation in ML", because it goes into more detail about techniques for compiling functional languages:

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Compiler-Implementation-Andrew-...
Research paper
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The report on the crash that prompted this TV program:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/12/heathrow_777_update/

Crashing a functioning airliner on purpose seems kind of wasteful, I hope something that industry can use will come out of this.
Pull an "Office Space". I am serious. Only go into the office when you feel like it. Do things that you enjoy, watch some kung-fu movies with your kids or whatever. It can take months to fire someone as long as you don't get into a fight, and you'll get severance. When your boss gives you shit about your work hours, literally tell him "Sorry, I have a meeting with the consultants" and leave for the day. You're talented, you'll get another job, and there is a decent chance you will not even be fired. They will let you work from home or in a different dept. after your boss complains about you to his boss.
You're absolutely correct, we have scraps of information about our security here and there, but no formal page spelling it out. Our security page will be located at http://github.com/security, expect it up within the next day or so.
You can use this to your advantage in permanent roles where the recruiter's cut is a percentage of your starting salary.
I'm in the Los Angles area. There doesn't seem to be an event to actually go to right now, but even if there isn't one I was planning on making an irc channel or something.
China’s Pig Farmers Amass Copper, Nickel, Sucden Says
(Very sorry for the redundancy, BTW. Not sure how it happened, and I can no longer fix it.)
I remember a time when UE was really the best option for Windows. Just think, (S)FTP integration! I certainly put a lot of miles on it.

Nowadays though, so many editors (some of them free) with identical feature-sets have popped up across all platforms that the only way I can see this having traction is if former users are really vying for the UltraEdit UI.

I remember having UI separation anxiety moving from Photoshop to GIMP, but my memories of UltraEdit aren't so fond.
Do you have any advice on the best way to get started with the simple 10 min meditation?
That's right, one of the first steps to becoming a ruthless sociopath is to align your interests with the right people. IT could learn a few things from the pro sports/entertainment worlds. A good engineer ("rockstar", as it were) can easily make their corporate overlords just as much money as a real rock star or pro athlete.
He read my blog
That's interesting, I thought it was a direct (joke) response to the "Go" vs "Go!" situation. The "Go!" author stated that his language came first and then we find these conveniently aged commits the following day.

Either way, it's nice to see Google not taking itself too seriously.
Banks Bite Bullet on Loans
That article is tremendously helpful because I don't have a natural intuitive grasp of status. Thank you.

One thing that confuses me is when it's strategic to act high status, and when it's strategic to act low status. For example, sometimes, when you need something from someone - do you want to raise their status, and make them like you? Or do you want to convey high status, so they will want to associate with you? Or should you try to juggle raising your status and then lowering it, in order to achieve the illusion of parity?

E.g. Selling to a customer, getting a job, getting help with something in the workplace. . .

Somebody has got to have written something about this. Please help.
regulations can erect barriers to entry (the cost of complying with regulation in many industries are massive, cars for example), meaning that existing players can lower their service standards by a set amount (down to the point where a competitor could expect that better service would gain enough of the market to recoup the entry costs). a barrier to entry effectively changes the risk/reward expectation of investors.
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UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homeless