skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two rebels take on Apple Computers.
On Edit2: interfaces don't replace generics, they're more like a strong duck-typing system (if that makes any sense).

Generics are being worked on (according to the tech talk), but they haven't determined the best way to do them yet.
When giving presentations, the only rule that matters is the rule of attention
Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code
it's funny how even in languages that don't use 'begin/end' markers (such as python) there are extraneous characters, such as the () pair when calling a function (surely there are ways to do without that ?)

The () when calling a function with no arguments is not extraneous -- because Ruby lets you omit that, it needs yet another function type to disambiguate when you want a reference to a method (total of 4: Methods, Procs, Lambdas, and Blocks).

What is completely superfluous in the syntax is the colon preceding an expression suite -- you're already using a keyword and indenting the next line(s).
Twitter Census: Publishing the First of Many Datasets
Christian Swinehart is at the top of his field, working for a legendary design company. http://samizdat.cc/me

Funny how because he's not a familiar tech name, everyone here assumes he's an upstart.
Here are some software sales stats for the past 3 years. The Wii has shown strong sales so far but has plateaued this year: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25740 (though it could be due to lack of meaningful choice this year in comparison to last year, not due to abandonment)

Admittedly my remark about the console being abandoned quickly was a hasty generalization. I took into account some reports from 2007 that questioned the longevity of the Wii and had gathered the percentage of people in Japan that used the system frequently. That and experiences my friends and others I know online have had with their Wiis.

http://games.ign.com/articles/827/827313p1.html
To an iDisk site.

And that speaks volumes.
Summary: Rails has a learning curve. If you're a newbie, you will get confused.

None of these errors are confusing once you've been using Rails for a couple of weeks.
I recently began working with Ruby on Rails after years in ASP.Net and I still have to refer to the API, Guides, and documentation so I consider myself an amateur. I'm having to get used to programming "better" since I no longer have the assistance of a compiler to catch these type of errors.

As you probably know, Rails is about convention over configuration. This increases the initial learning curve but speeds up development once you understand the conventions. I read Agile Web Development with Rails and was able to make it over the initial hump of "what..why is this capitalized and this plural and the singular" stage.
4. Which is pretty close to the optimal number of choices to give potential customers.
Bing adds WolframAlpha's data to selected queries
The Digital Economy's Coming Subprime Crisis (AdRev Problems)
A comparison between the subprime crisis and the current problems starting to show up with Facebook advertising revenue.
How to Learn (Almost) Anything
CodeRun - a browser-based IDE in the cloud
First day of University
Its interesting to know from engineering startup. Would you mind telling the name of your startup.....
Polyglot Programming with Groovy   
Calling Clojure from Groovy looks cool
He's also the developer behind the three20 project which Apple has recently been rejecting apps using three20 because it was supposedly using private APIs.

I can see how that can be frustrating to put in all that work in to develop a very valuable and powerful library and with the flick of a switch Apple makes your work almost useless.
This really reminds me of the old Joshua Davis experiments.
gsiener : Do you mean you wish you could use it to bring data from a SQL database into Excel rather than use SQL on Excel data ?

I have considered adding this functionality, allowing the user to connect to any data source. It become pretty complex pretty quickly though, supporting a query that joins tables in different databases, with their different types, would be a big challenge.
I find the irony of a developer working for one of the biggest walled gardens on the internet complaining about walls around someone else's garden to be very deep into the pot/kettle/black territory...
Aside from obvious quality benefits, the review process is a good thing because it results in users having more trust in apps developed by relatively unknown developers/companies.
Sorry, but to my beer-addled brain (just went out with my kid for beers, so I'm probably talking like an idiot here) this page looked like: Fuck! (I'm profane) Dummy! (I'm smart) Look Here! (I'm angry), and Here's References! (I'm hooked in)

Too much of the internet is like this, unfortunately.

Correct, but not worthy.

Not upvoted.
I'm interested in the independent opinions. I hope to see more of them going forward.

Here is my relatively uninformed opinion based on having read through their examples and some of the recent discussion.

Having looked at the language a little, I think I understand why they don't have exceptions yet (if ever). The problem is that they envision using this to write servers, and the servers will essentially use a microkernel design with message passing through channels. But when one of your little miniservers goes down, who is it supposed to report the error to and how will that be dealt with? If there is no good answer, then what sense does it make to let a miniserver go down without warning?

To be concrete, take this example from the documentation:

func startServer(op binOp) (service chan *request, quit chan bool) {
service = make(chan *request);
quit = make(chan bool);
go server(op, service, quit);
return service, quit;
}

If an exception is thrown within the server function, who catches it? What can startServer do? Someone who talked to chan? The last process who tried to talk to chan? Everyone who tries to talk to chan? Do we shut down the whole program? Concurrency gives you tangled flow of controls, and you don't have a simple stack where it is clear who has responsibility for a given error. In some ways it really does make sense for the server to pass back an error object somewhere and let someone else figure out what to do about it.

Moving on, I think a better mental model for "interface" is "implicitly matched mixin". Like a Ruby mixin and unlike a Java interface, once you've matched the set of methods in the interface you can now call the methods that are appropriate for that interface. That's very powerful, and potentially very dangerous. When you write a larger system I could definitely see method name collisions becoming a big deal.

Moving on, the lack of generics is huge, and I hope they solve it. They have first class functions and closures, but when asked on the mailing list whether they support standard functional goodness like map and reduce, the response was that the type system made that really hard. When I think about it, I can understand why they are fighting the type system. But if they can add generics then they can solve that problem. The challenge is doing it efficiently.

And my final thought is that anyone thinking of building a real server out of this should read up on capability systems before figuring out their security/permissions model. I say this because having a channel to a service IS a capability, but most programmers don't realize how powerful that organizational concept can be. If you think that you're among them, http://www.eros-os.org/essays/capintro.html provides a good introduction.
I loved those books and I had a system for reading them. Each time I had to make a decision that involved me jumping to one page or another, I would fold the corner of the page. Each time I hit an endpoint, I would travel back to a folded page and then make a new decision to see where it would take me.

Funny how memory works. I don't think I've recalled my system for reading these books for years, perhaps more than a decade.
This is really too bad. I use Facebook via the iPhone app more than the web interface. I can't wait to see what he does next.
Poor attention to detail is going to bite you in the ass as a programmer no matter what technology you're using.
Ummm, Facebook's wall is quite a bit less ominous than Apple's. You may want to return that irony to the store, they cheated you and watered it down.
gem install ruby-debug
How hard would it be to implement a 'classic' or 'noobs' controller (filter) for handling how different items are viewed? Easiest hack (from someone ignorant in arc) could be as simple as adding an optional view variable after each id.

Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?
su - [username]
I have already used the name "Go" for *MY* programming language
I'm not sure all of us see the quality benefits quite so obviously. Are you implying that dictionaries with censored words are better quality?
Collecting intimate personal details and selling it to advertisers is less ominous than screening apps to ensure quality?
How to Benefit From a Freelancer's Mind-Set
college and TECH cocktail
It is intended to be absolutely safe: dereferencing an invalid pointer doesn't result in "undefined behavior" -- it results in your program halting every time. You can't accidentally succeed or allow for buffer overflows, which is all that's important (especially since Go doesn't have exceptions).

Hopefully they can rip off the design of GHC's amazing parallel garbage collector (it runs in its own pthread), and ditch the current mark-and-sweep.
Freshman year in college. Ten years ago. At a math class.
Chipotle's specialty, San Francisco burritos, aren't Mexican, they are northern Californian :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_burrito
I'm involved in a couple of ventures and I've met each of my co-founders through past employment (all of us working at the same employer(s)).
I thought they shut down that program recently?
more information regarding app store rejections: http://groups.google.com/group/three20/browse_thread/thread/...

app store safe fork: http://github.com/uprise78/three20-P31
I'm sorry but i don't understand what it all means, would you care to explain?
At the first Atlanta Startup Weekend. It was only after continued meets, coding and planning things out over coffee on saturdays, and so on, that it became apparent we were both interested in working together. 2 years later, still kicking it on Skribit.com and it's a good fit. We're both technical, he's a better overall developer and brings some previous startup & finance experience to the table, while my main hats include front-end and (some) design, etc.

team page: http://skribit.com/about
This is a typical exapmle of market focus and niching based on focusing on core competency.
I'm not sure I'd describe them as healthy, exactly. They do place a strong emphasis on using good ingedients, but portion sizes are huge -- a chicken burrito is more than 1,000 calories.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21838237/?pg=6#TDY_20WorstFoods
I agree. The majority of their concerns can be addressed by parsing out markup on the way into the DB and storing the markup-free version in a separate location. This is a lot of acrobatics for marginal return.
Kids cereal marketing is fascinating, from the toys to the way the mascot's eyes tend to look down [1]. I didn't get to make a lot of decisions as a kid, but cereal was one of them.

I was also exposed to another strange aspect of cereal marketing: the sugar content. My father instituted a rule that we could have any cereal with <= 10 grams of sugar per serving, and so my sister and I became acutely aware of said levels. Captain Crunch was out of the question, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch would dip above and below the line, with a period of several months. Nearly all cereals I watched displayed this behavior.

[1] http://i30.tinypic.com/2598znp.jpg
I don't have kids, but I am reasonably sure that when I do, I might choose to work harder than otherwise in hopes of providing a better life for them. That includes leaving them money after I die. I might be gone, but the money is a product of my labors. It was still mine to spend.

Furthermore, I have never found Buffet's malinvestment in lucky scions argument convincing. Yes, they were born lucky, but you shouldn't handicap them for that reason. Morover, clearly some very wealthy people do chose to give most of their money away as opposed to giving it all to their heirs. Buffet and Gates have both pledged to do so with most of their money.

Merging the two ideas: if the government is collecting assets to prevent malinvestment in unworthy heirs after the proven patriarch dies, why shouldn't the government chose to confiscate the wealth of those who they deem to be making bad investments while they are alive?
i'm sure gruber has some witty writeup as to why hewitt is wrong, and how his post is a big win not only for apple but for users and world hunger
You're talking about Beacon, which would gather data about what you're doing on other sites.
Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge
More than 100 specialists from 20 different countries participated last week in the Culture Forum of Barcelona and created an international coalition to urge respect for the civil rights of citizens and artists in the digital era. This Charter, which invites citizens to take it as theirs and use it in their requests and demands, will be disseminated worldwide through formal presentations to governments and also through individuals' actions.
Dead 8800 GTX scienced to undeath by oven, mad owner
The tale of one man's journey to revive his dead GeForce 8800 GTX using panic, happy thoughts, and an oven pre-heated to 385°F.
NASA Great Observatories Celebrate International Year of Astronomy
Thoughts on the Go Programming Language
Taco Bell is also pretty successful, and that contradicts the article. Other contradictory examples are Olive Garden and The Cheesecake Factory, both of which have extensive menus and are wildly succesful, the latter also having the same scarcity dynamics and lines as In-N-Out.

Articles like this are annoying. There are multiple ways to success, and presenting one as clearly better than others when there are so many counterexamples is disingenuous.

In-N-Out has a simple menu, above average ingredient quality, and treats their workers pretty well. All great qualities. But it's pretty evident, especially when it comes to food, that you can be bad in all those areas and still be successful, and perhaps even outcompete those who are better than you, if you focus on price and consistency, even if the thing you're consistent at is being mediocre.
I looked at Groovy a few months ago and really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, I couldn't really find anything that it did that made it stand out from the other mountain of choices of languages that live on the JVM.

Between Scala, Jython and JRuby, I think Groovy is going to have an uphill battle for adoption.

Are there any Groovy developers out there who can shed some light on what it provides that you couldn't get from a language with a larger audience?
The iPhone app is continuing, if it sucks he can always walk over to the desk of whoever is working on it and tell them why it sucks :)
We market (and price) GitHub:FI as our enterprise product specifically because we feel small to medium size companies should be using github.com.

If your and/or your partners need some help putting your mind at ease about hosting your code with us, feel free to email me directly at pj@github.com and I'll do my best to help.
Hmm, that's interesting. The first example doesn't seem to work. I just get "#<unknown 0x00000007>". I wonder if it has to do with a difference with gcc.
Well, PageRank closes the loop too. But I've always seen it presented as a static analysis. I don't know how they actually implement it. This would need to be inherently dynamic. I think it's the dynamic aspect of the thing that makes if feel different. And also why I started thinking in terms of dynamical systems and control theory.
Mornings - Project Sleepalot.

Afternoons - build something fun using OpenGL, as I've always wanted to learn it properly. Ideas welcome.
The sample is pretty good. If I were an ambitious sports journalist, I would use Stats Monkey to generate an initial boilerplate article of a game (drudgery anyway if a computer can do it) and use all the time I saved to do actual in-depth, behind-the-scenes reporting (i.e. my real job).

So perhaps we can combine automation with an investigative human element to more efficiently achieve a better product?
I hadn't heard about this before now. What a cool idea.
I'm really hesitating to comment. It's way too easy for us types to miss really good ideas due to our preconceptions. But it's hard for me to look past the fact that this looks like a really bad abstraction over the top of the structure document abstraction that was designed specifically to suit NPR's purpose.

For example, they show the <em> tag being stored by position in the database separately from the content itself, seemingly unaware of the significance that <em> is a semantic tag. It means emphasis. If the iPod doesn't like <em> for emphasis, well then that's why it's a semantic tag. You can remove semantic tags or replace them with alternative markup or binary formats as needed because they have meaning designed for parsing and formatting.

It's all well and good to hate on XML for inappropriate uses. But, critical point here, documents are what XML is for! And there is a shocking wealth of libraries in just about every language available today that will handle document markup just fine.

It seems to me to be a quintessential reinvention of the wheel, and the XML hating has just gone on too far at this point.
but why would his grandmother be in the hospital since exactly the day of his birth?

and if she was in the hospital, why didnt he go visit her before then?
Either way, you would have to parse it into something equivalent to what they are storing in the database so you you could handle the various target formats individually.

As long as you tightly control writes to the database, I don't see the problem. And, you don't have the overhead of parsing on every read. For an environment where reads will be a few orders of magnitude greater than writes, it does make some sense.
HP in Quest for China Market
Groklaw became popular for their incredibly earnest legal reporting on the SCO debacle, despite being incapable of ever getting their technical details straight.

Since I can immediately see when they constantly get the technical facts wrong, I feel I can't trust their legal interpretations at all, since I can't judge them so easily.

If you fuck up in a subject matter I know well, I'm not going to trust you about your claimed expertise.
Done correctly, it can actually be a sort of partnership between the parents and the brand. The favorite cartoon can help the parents get their kids to eat stuff that might otherwise be difficult. Flintstones vitamins are a good example.

Its too bad that we see more Kung-fu Panda McDonald's toys than Spongebob lettuce.
From a developer standpoint, immensely so.
Perhaps this should say "SourceForge Inc. changes its name", since the only implication here is that the company is changing its name. The SourceForge web site that it owns, doesn't seem to be changing.
3Com Founder Bob Metcalfe Weighs in on HP Buying His Old Firm for $2.7 Billion
The walls are still there. Facebook is still a roach motel for data and now they are going to be spanking platform developers whose apps are proving to be detrimental to Facebook's reputation and user experience. Same tune, different band.
Oops I didn't mean to say that an iPhone contract is tied to a specific phone. You could always swap the sim to a different phone.

what I was trying to say was that AT&T has a special iPhone contract that is separate from their regular contracts, in that it comes with a $30/month data plan.
I first came across Justin when he blogged from the FamilySearch development conference back in March of 2008. My wife and I had been looking for months for a technical co-founder with a strong interest in family history. Justin's blog posts were noticed/quoted by a genealogy blogger I followed and that quickly led us to him.

Emails and phone conversations soon followed, and within a month he had started making our fledgling app his own, taking it in all sorts of new and better directions. Through it all, we've only actually "met" face-to-face for a total of about five days during the 20+ months we've worked part-time on Genlighten.
Getting the audience to remember your message
I think this story demonstrates the power of a creative idea in attracting an audience for your product.

A local radio show featured a representative from TMZ, a national pop culture show, today. At the end of the interview the representative asked the hosts what time TMZ was on locally. This led to a debate among the host about what time the show aired. TMZ got over a minute of free advertising telling the show's time and station, all thanks to the reps creativity. This on a show where the host makes a big deal out of "shameless self plugs." ts for creativity, and an easy and effective way for people to remember the show.
Except for the bit about listing accounts with the proper rights, this has been a part of OSX for as long as I can remember. Certainly before April 2005. Is it really that easy to patent a well-known process by adding a trivial thing?
We were literally married. We met in an honors algorithms class at nyu.
The purpose of the estate tax is not so much to ensure that the capital being taxed is put to better use (which I'm not sure would be the case on average; the government would surely be a better entity to entrust with the money than a profligate son, but those are not the norm from what I can tell, and wiser offspring could be better investors than Uncle Sam), as to ensure the continuation of the meritocracy in our society. By their inherited wealth, scions of prominent families can exercise significant power over the rest of the nation, and this power will tend to be exercised to the detriment of meritocracy, since a system that rewards talent and energy runs exactly contrary to the interests of the inherited-wealth class. (Humans care about relative wealth and power socially, even though absolute wealth production is not a zero-sum game)

However, it is true that being able to pass on wealth to one's children can be an incentive to produce more, so that on the other hand points to the benefit of a lower estate tax.

So, I think the best compromise is somewhere between the pro-meritocracy 100% tax and the pro-short-term-productivity 0% tax; that way there is still a significant incentive to earn for one's offspring, but if 1/x of the money is taxed away in each generation (and the important thing is not where it goes, but that it is taken out of the hands of the rich family), there is an exponential-decay curve for the wealth and power of the family. However, it's important that the tax is high enough to counteract the interest gains that even uninspired investing can bring. I won't venture to propose a sweet spot, but I think that approach should provide the most balance and social benefit overall.
I think so but can you show me a directed edge graph?