skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But read subltle differences in shoe-lace patterns after a glance and cross-reference with the list of meanings? Hard. They'd just look like a mess to me. I suspect that the most you can get out of it reliably is about 2 bits, so four signals, including one zero state meaning "no message".
Choosing the Right Bathroom Vanities
Are you in the process of choosing the bathroom vanities? You will certainly find it highly challenging to pick the right vanities that will convert your bathroom space into a beautiful part of your house. Today we have so many options before us and to pick something from the myriad options that we have in front of us can be a highly confusing task. Here are few simple guidelines that will help you pick the best bathroom vanities.
I think Clojure is not a simple language. The reason is, that you have to learn about 1) Lisp, 2) Clojure's approach to concurrency (immutable data structures + reference types) and 3) the JVM. These are all fairly complex systems on their own. The combination of them is what makes Clojure interesting, and, in my opinion, you can't leave one out and still have a great language.

Depending on your knowledge, this may make it a bad choice as a first language because it's so much to learn at once. You could be better off, to start by learning something more similar to what you already know (possibly Python/Django or Ruby/Rails for web programming).

That said, Clojure is learnable, of course. It may just take more time. If it feels right to you, then go for it. Enthusiasm about the tools will help your learning. And either way, it's not like you are making a mistake.
Software Version Control Visualization (videos)
The site is nothing but a demo and a "Notify me when you're actually accepting customers." There's links to 5 other sites that do the exact same thing. There's literally hundreds of other sites out there that do similar things.
You mean the 'business model' of "annoy the piss out of site visitors for sake of more ad views"?

Well, it's one approach to trying to rescue the Boston Globe from death.

...one destined to lead to online (as well as on-paper) death - in my humble hope.
> ...think are important to continue doing research on, and that some of them fudged it, exaggerated a bit, and polished it a bit to make it easier to "sell" it to the politicians in charge of handing out the grant money.

This is precisely the kind of thinking that got the United States into the War in Iraq.
Thanks for your response. :)

Quick question: regarding learning about the JVM, are you aware of any good resources, especially any which look at it from a Clojure perspective?
CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination
Most parsers nowadays are generated via yacc and others. You write the structure, yacc generates the parser (and flex the lexer). It's something completely different if you write the parser yourself.
Jeff has been making great games for years. The games in the Avernum series all play pretty much the same way, but each one has a huge world, a deep branching plot, and some kind of new twist in the combat system.

I still haven't beaten Avernum 5 and I've had it since last December. It's not too hard, I just keep running out of extra time. It's just such a big game!
I've had Nokia E71 for over a year now and I've never had any problems with the keyboard. And it's not a sliding keyboard (it's more blackberry like), so it has a lot smaller keys than this one.
Ruby Draft Specification
Pain Free Internet Marketing Promotion For Webmasters
Internet marketing website promotion is the practice of using strategies (both on page and off page) to achieve and maintain high ranking in search engines and visibility within your market.
"For the world's economy, of course, trillions of dollars are now at stake in pursuit of emissions reductions based on the flawed science that these leaked emails have helped lay bare."

From what I've read about them the emails lay little bare about the science - more about the politics of trying to keep down the FUD-slingers and easily-publicized, some-what contrary findings.

Further, a huge increase in funding does not constitute evidence that it is being used for "flawed science".

The future of powerful data and analysis of climate changes is in sad shape if (unsigned) articles in WSJ.com by persons of unknown scientific credentials become the guides for world policy.
I've got 67 just using random placements with heuristics, programmed in Python. Apparently they've got 73 (which is 289/4 rounded up), and that's why they think this might be possible.
California, Chicago, Phoenix & Texas Water Heater Sales
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Mint.com: Aaron Patzer's personal and business journey to $170 million
This video was posted a little while ago but it was embedded in a Techcrunch post. I've just watched it and really thought it deserved some more attention.
Is that sarcasm or what? During the George W Bush's tenure as president, the US government (backed by the massive oil companies) WAS that organisation. Why did they not prevail? Cause the science doesn't work. This is likely to be the very reason why some climate change scientists have such a hard nosed attitude

Even if you don't believe that is what happened then you must admit that the existing energy companies have a huge incentive to stop this and easily have the funds to compete with the current spending. Please explain why they haven't managed to do this successfully.

The most likely answer is that the science doesn't work and the scientific community has eventually rejected their money. So the energy companies have moved on to funding sceptic groups instead.
The more I hear about this frightful bill, the more I have to conclude it's Mandelson's effort to poison the wells ahead of the inevitable Labour defeat. He wants it to ruin everyone's day, while being attractive enough to a business-first Tory that it's hard for Cameron to repeal.
BBC News - Pedal power lights Copenhagen's Christmas tree
Energy saving, made in Copenhagen
very nicely done, we tried something similar some time ago but i never finished it :-) good luck
You found the form with 12 fields to fill in to be frictionless?
More feedback:

- Really lovely site. Lots of great touches. I typed that I will be going to Bar Wotever (actually the name of a night, not a place) tonight and it figured out where the venue is automatically.

- Could the little red bars next to each time window (today, next week etc.) give some idea of futureness? e.g. green for today, yellow for this week, red for further away in time.

- Can I hide a friend's plan?

- If I'm on the Discover Friends page, the data does not refresh when I switch between the Twitter/Facebook/Email tags. To do that, I must refresh the whole page in my browser.
True but the links are quite relevant and telling.
Lead time to sell this Christmas for any piece of hardware that is to be available in volume started last January.
Plancast needs support for uncertainty. I might be going to this place sometime next week but I'm not sure yet. Perhaps if a friend also says they're going then I'll be more certain.

Similar to upcoming.org's interested vs attending.
Mutual Exclusion with Locks - an Introduction
Great insights into the problems with concurrency
Video lecture by Brian Kernighan on the Elements of Programming Style
Michael Jackson heads Yahoo top 10 searches
It's true that in this one specific instance, we can subtract yearlyadj to get back the original data (now that we have the code). I was referring to the raw data in general, not this specific case.

If they did nothing more add known vectors to the data, we can reconstruct the original data once we have access to their code (which they also didn't release). The minute they take a moving average, or use a best fit curve, this becomes impossible.

You also still haven't explained why you believe climate science deserves lower levels of care and transparency than econometrics.
Site:wikipedia.org هيام الحمصي - بحث Google‏
Only like every oil company on earth? You don't seriously believe what you wrote?

Not even sure if there are not skeptics on government grants - why shouldn't there be? Do you have any insights into who is researching, and on whose money?

However, a honest question: who benefits from belief in global warming, and who benefits from belief in global not-warming? I have a hard time coming up with big industries benefiting from global warming belief, but there might be some?
In Defense of Software Patents
Of Geeks and Girls
Ruby on Rails security updated
Isn't that how all politics are conducted? It would be non-trivial to come up with a better system, too.
Memory will be the real performance bottleneck on your VPS
That's actually a really good question. Since the PC era of the 80s startups have been software only. Perhaps with mobile platforms opening up we will see more devices from startups.
I think the Droid might be converting a lot of these people. I have heard several Droid users say that the keyboard is bad, and the onscreen keyboard was actually better than the physical keyboard.
Some of it seems a bit ill informed and fanboy-ish though.

I'm not a JVM expert but claiming, for example, that "Hotspot [is] available wherever Java is available" is clearly false. Maybe he means JIT when he says Hotspot, but that's not true either.

The Zero and Shark projects are currently trying to bring OpenJDK and then a JIT to the platforms that Sun doesn't directly support (and even then doing it in a hacky way, as doing it for real i.e. rewriting Hotspot would be too much work):

http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/ZeroSharkFaq

And I'd love someone knowledgeable to compare the "free upgrades" you get from JVM updates to the same effect you get from GCC or LLVM improvements, Profile Guided Optimisation or updates in underlying libraries and OSes.

In general the summary could be "We build our wacky idiosyncratic language on top of a mature, well-engineered, portable system that was designed and built to do something else". Matz also built his Ruby on top of mature, well-engineered portable systems (Unix etc.) and while Ruby is cool and benefitted from building on that base, it wasn't magic pixie dust (or people wouldn't be so keen on JRuby).
> Blue jeans are very practical in all seasons.

Not when it rains. (Think Northern Englang/Scotland, or maybe Seattle.) :-)
From wikipedia: Proprietary rights in relation to a trademark may be established through actual use in the marketplace, or through registration of the mark with the trademarks office.
I have a friend who is a hospital administrator. She recently complained about an awful Oracle system that tries to do everything and fails.

As I think about my friend with the Oracle system I wonder if the problem is technology or the companies implementing the technology?
@thwarted, there's a fullscreen button in the lower right.
I'm pretty sure phenwoods was being sarcastic here, and his comment can be read as saying

"Many companies with much lose from CO2 induced AGW being true have plenty of money. If there was a scientific case to be made for it being false they would have been able to fund it."
In other words, it makes sense to switch to a very low overhead web server. How does quixote or node compare in terms of memory performance?
Big Bang machine breaks world record
> Perhaps they're just good at being friendly.

I think that's it. Here in Edinburgh, there are many independent coffee shops, but few manage to create the friendly warm atmosphere of Starbucks. Out of my favorite 4 coffeeshops, 2 are Starbucks.
I feel there’s a chance an experienced programmer has a certain connection with his/her "native" programming language

Sure, you will tend know more about the language that you have worked with the most, which in turn tends to be the one you prefer. But that need have nothing to do with the language you learn first.

A very large number of the programmers you will meet today learned programming via something like C64 or Applesoft BASIC, or (at best) Turbo Pascal. These languages were not exactly Lisp. In those days, BASIC only had global variables. Our growth was not stunted. The idea that learning BASIC stunts your growth was a load of crap at the time, and it remains a load of crap.

If you have the startup itch and want to teach yourself good habits, here's my advice: Don't dither, and don't pick up habits that encourage dithering. Like fretting too much about your language of choice. If you actually plan to build web software, take up Ruby, Python, or even PHP. You know, something normal. Something which features lots of libraries and blogs and books and colleagues and infrastructure.

And learn Lisp too. At the same time. Start with SICP, which involves starting with Scheme. Another useful Lisp to tinker with: emacs Lisp.

Eventually you will learn at least four languages, so don't worry too much about which comes first.
But they're still short and anonymous. Besides relevant and telling, they would be more appealing if they weren't shortened.
It might be pocket change to Google or J.P. Morgan. In the academic world, those are career making amounts.

And big grants do give financial rewards to the PI. Say I get a $10 million grant; my university will take about $5 million off the top in "overhead" (to be spent on overpaid administrators, student stress counselors, the latino student center, and maybe even education). I turn to them and say "give me a 50% pay raise or I leave". The university then compares the cost of a 50% pay raise to half my grant, and gives me a 75% raise.
I don't know why you got downvoted so hard, I think you have a fair opinion (even though I disagree with it).

IMHO, the absolute best programmers I've ever worked with looked at programming as a game, as something clever to do. They reveled in the beauty of elegant code, and they got angry when reading bad code, and laughed heartily at particularly clever code etc.

To them, they had internalized the language of the machine and were trying to create art with their code, not science.

One thing that I've never been unsure of is that L. Wall understands that machines can be approached 2 ways, either as a raw tool, issuing instructions to be completed precisely as directed. Or the other approach, which is to think of the machine as a being (albeit one with a particularly different kind of mind) and the language is a lingua franca that you can use to communicate with it. Perl false squarely on the side of a programming language being a language (in the communication sense) vs. being a language (in the "set of instructions" sense).

The reason Perl 1 liners are so interesting, for example, is that they convey implicit little secrets between you and the machine, much like you might do with a certain kind of nod to a friend at a party when a certain topic comes up that conveys a world of meaning between you and your friend.

The reason these little "operators" are so witty is that they convey lots of meaning between you and the machine relatively simply, and look clever at the same time.

I think most programmers at one time or another realize that though, in theory, computers are supposed to do exactly what you've told them to do, the ecosystem their software is running in is just on the edge of nondeterminism and wish for a way to convey to the computer what they "mean" for it to do rather than what they tell it to do. "Machine, I wish for you to open this file and count the number of times the words foo and bar show up in it". Perl is targeted at these kinds of cases.

That's now to say that other languages are bad, just different. Perl also has the unnerving ability to so quickly become obfuscated that it can be very hard to untangle by another developer. Languages like Python aim for code simplicity and readability and thus are much more suitable to large scale development practices than Perl is (that's not to say that Perl isn't used in these kinds of large projects, or that Python isn't used for one off scripts).
Nope! We have customers throughout the world.
Closure Compiler vs YUICompressor
I think it's very clever: they cover up their manipulation of data as bugs. They might even get away with it.

Seriously, interesting to read, hoping for more!
That last comment on his blog about the guy whose wife is about to leave him is sad. One of the main reasons it's important to have a supporting partner in life.
Awesome. With closure compiler although the advanced setting is unsafe, google have a plugin for firebug that will find the original part of your source for errors in the compiled version.

That means you can get really small target size in production, and fix anything in your source that causes problems in the advanced compiled versions.
I read DHH awhile ago and he mentioned only working 2 hrs a day (and not even everyday on your side project). I think most people even if they're octomom if they plan and schedule well enough could probably find 2 hrs a day (early in the morning or late at night) to squeeze in some work.

There's no requirement that it has to be an extra 6 or 8 hr marathon everyday for 6 months or year, etc.
I think your concept of programming is far to restricted if all you can compare it to is legal documents.

sad face

I grew up in this environment
http://demoscene.tv/

and quite often saw programmers taking very creative and artistic approaches to their code. They saw programming as art and wanted to express their art this way.

Is this applicable in a modern, large scale, corporate environment? Probably not, but just as it wouldn't be appropriate for me to fill out all of my TPS reports with oil paints it doesn't mean that oil painting doesn't have a place.
If you want to learn a language from the perspective of getting something done (in the startup webapp sphere), go for Python/Django or Ruby/Rails - they both have mature, well-established communities with plenty of documentation and available libraries.

Clojure seems quite cool, but it's a relatively new language and, especially when compared to the other two platforms mentioned above, it lacks the wealth of institutional knowledge about delivering good webapps that forms a significant portion of the value of Rails or Django.

Clojure is the exciting new thing you blog about. Rails or Django is what you used to write the blog itself.
This was weird: I read his post, and figured "doesn't apply to me, I'm not a mac guy". And then I realized I've been working on a MacBook for two months. Eh?
Well you will need to capture their credit card at least once. After that you can rack up charges silently. Make sure your terms of service authorize you to charge the end user at will.

To do that you can create a recurring profile through the API. Start it running today (the default) and it will immediately generate the first invoice, whose invoice_id will be returned in the Recurring.create response.

Do an Invoice.get on that id. Redirect the customer's user agent to the client_view link. They can pay the invoice and authorize autobilling from there.

After that you can Recurring.update the profile at will and every subsequent invoice will automatically be racked up in their credit card without their intervention.
Shocking Tiger Woods video (exclusive)
A bit convoluted and hard to follow, not really a convincing argument one way or the other. pg already wrote about software patents, with significantly more clarity.
I made http://flavors.me/zachaysan in about 5 mins. Looks nice, but the twitter feed is broken for this specific color scheme. And yes, I heavily modeled it off of dustincurtis.com.

Also, "readwriteweb" is an access code if you want to try yourself.
It's no where near 10^173 because of the box limitations. Adjusting for summitry's there are 12 (or less) 2x2 boxes. But then building a 3x3 box, the total is not 12 * 4^5 possible because at least 4 * 12 of them are eliminated by the boxing constraint. It's more than that but I am not doing this by hand.

The reason you can't crack RSA is because after skipping composite numbers and small primes you cant further reduce the search space. Don't forget 20x20 box is known to not be solvable and the 16x16 box has at least one known solution.
Nokia 6760 slide launches in Singapore
I disagree. If I'm writing something for others to read then the presentation is an integral part of the process. Knowing how it's going to be laid out strongly affects what is written.
Blackberry OS 5.0 Review
Helpdesk_In_Digite.wmv (video/x-ms-wmv Object)
Fossilized Bacteria May Point to Life on Mars
Ask HN: Not raising expectations of the customer is not a defeatist attitude?
I've been woefully trying to convince my business partner for the last 5 years, that raising expectations of the client is NOT a good idea. I've always believed in the "Under promise and over deliver" idea. Further more, people perceive things as 'they' are not as 'we' are, so we dont know what it is that they are dreaming.

His argument is, that its a defeatist attitude that lacks courage and conviction. Im all for ambition, achievement and results, but i feel there is a distinction to be made.

Can you please help me make this point?
1. We are billing oriented. We do time tracking, expense tracking, support ticketing, and estimate/quote management because they all relate to the invoice. However we also integrate with dozens of other apps to make it easier for you to run your whole business on the cloud.

http://community.freshbooks.com/addons

2. You do need yo send them at least once to an recurring invoice so we can grab their credit card. After that we don't need to be in the way.

3. This is the Internet. You can't be successful without a ton of competitors popping up.

3.1. SaaS is about small pieces loosely joined. Companies are building what you want in chunks. See http://thesmallbusinessweb.com
Computers rarely save money. They usually allow people to do more in the same amount of time for the same money. In the case of hospitals, they provide a better level of care for the same money and in the same time. e.g. I was in an appointment with my cardiac consultant yesterday. He was able to pull up the results of my recent exercise test during the consultation, rather than having me wait to receive a letter with the results and his thoughts.
Throwing computers at health care
Mechanize for Perl & Ruby is quite cool.

However, it's not able to execute JavaScript. The only lib I found which does so with a reasonable subset of JS is HttpUnit, in Java. Though it has kind of ugly interface IMO, I use it with a success. Doing it from a Clojure REPL makes it quite handy tool for web scripting.
I just emailed them about that. They got back to me quick. They're going to switch that text around. :)
When I'm at home, family comes first.