skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From Wikipedia:

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems.

So software development (and therefore Web Development) is not, in itself, computer science, but builds on computer science concepts and findings (theory, algorithms, etc).
Iran cracks down on critics posting on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
There isn't some unified continuum of power in languages, though. There are some problems for which a H-M-ish type system is a tremendous advantage, and there are others for which it gets in the way. Same with lazy evaluation - it can make a problem much simpler or much harder to reason about. Sometimes using a language built from the ground up to support distributed and concurrent programming (e.g. Erlang), unification and backtracking (Prolog), or constraint programming is the right tool for the job. Sometimes being able to work close to the Unix kernel or run on an embedded system without an OS is more important.

Languages are a means to an end -- they help manage complexity while solving a problem. There's value in being able to extend a language's semantics to support a superset of several major language families, but unless handled very carefully, it can turn the host language into a sprawling mess in the process.
"To the best of your knowledge" just means you haven't bothered to find out.
What would be nice, is if the credit card companies could save your "default" shipping preferences. Then, unless you wanted to ship somewhere else, online checkout would only need to ask for your CC number... almost as easy as a retail transaction.
How To Get Me To Hang Up On You
side note: reminded me why I hate office hours, being "forced" (i'm sure you don't literally force them out of the office) would drive me nuts. I find i'm really productive crazy hours. hence why i'm sat in the office at 6PM on a saturday night. on hacker news. i digress.

Asana is a pre-launch VC funded startup: I'd expect they'll trust the employees to work till they feel they're done for the day.

Seems like a killer company to work at. Amazing team. Best VCs in the business. Everyone that is anyone as an advisor. Etc.
There's a parallel in business software development here. Often a programmer can toil in obscurity from his business counterparts, frustratingly producing no tangible output, until one day he press the big green button, and all the underlying code he's fleshed out comes together to produce something visible and dramatic.

The progress doesn't exist until it touches people in a way they intuitively understand.

What nanotech needs is a youtube video of a bucket of slop spontaneously organizing into something useful.
Yes. I did not see the video live, am seeing it now that it is posted. I should not have speculated without seeing the video. Sorry. :-(

He also is doing the interview from a borrowed office, which could easily explain why he was unable to get the wifi running (ended up connecting via mifi, i.e. cellular).
> Besides, taking these are not trivial, so it does show some "ability".

Technical ability. As in, the ability to operate devices to their specifications. There can be insights in this which have yet to be widely learned. For example, the recent rise in popularity of high speed cameras as a form of motion-still photography (http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2009/10/13/a-new-kind-of-photo...) is a good example.

But panoramas? While there have been a lot of advances in panorama stitching software, but as for technique, the only real recent change has been an increase in the use of the technique for gathering ultra-high res images (or ultra-shallow depth of field) for more conventional shots.

> But maybe you only value artistic ability?

To be honest? In this age of pushbutton HDR, cameras that can recover from 2 stop underexposures in post, and a digital darkroom that can completely change your photo infinitely... Artistic talent is one of the few techniques that cannot be bought, it has to be learned.

And this piece, while worthy of praise as a difficult shot is not of particular artistic value. To me, anyways.
When it considers them spammy, MFA & Co or finds them cloaking. (Didn't check the link ;))
If you render the report as an HTML document and serve it with a mime-type of application/vnd.ms-excel
the users system will prompt them open it in excel.

Excel will parse it with all of the nice formatting and everything!
simple:

many professional cameras (20+ mpix) used by many photographers to take pictures of their appropriate sections
Google scholar can usually find PDFs which authors' posted to their personal websites.
Hmm, well I knew what I did was not the best way, but I thought if I just linked the story, not many people would read the whole thing ! So I thought this was the best way to reach out to a larger audience, give them a summary of the story.
I actually do force them out of the office around 6-7pm because the office is my apartment and I live with my girlfriend who gets home around that time. (that doesn't mean work has to stop if they want to continue when they get home)...

I agree with you in principle, once we get office space everyone will have a key and the schedule will be a little more flexible.

I do think there is something to be said for balance however. Working 12 hours one day and only 4 the next because you're burned isn't necessarily more or less productive. The issue I have with this is that it hinges on the assumption that you can operate as a lone-wolf, and often that's just not the case... mobile, web, and product (design) are working together in unison a majority of the time. We don't have the benefit of overlap right now. There's just three of us and were just getting started so there's a lot more collaboration at this junction.
That would be funny if it wasn't so insulting for modern VB. Python is the oldschool BASIC for science.
absolutely amazing! shame I haven't seen it before
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~mfedder/zombies.html
(story link, without spoiler)

Also read: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/scifi/byhisbootstraps.html
Right. The ramen profitable calculation: $300 ~ $450 rent (single room apartment to 3 room palace in an inconvenient location), $200 a month food bill (if you eat like a single Japanese twenty something), $300 for utilities (water, gas, lights, Internet, phone, TV tax, cell phone, gym membership). No car or train expenses, since I don't need either to get to my kitchen table. Throw in a little extra for taxes/health insurance.

For comparison: starting salaries for an engineer at my company, which pays well for this region, are $2.2k a month. (And most of them live in Nagoya, which makes all of the above numbers higher.)
When to use those technologies.
This case is discussed in the article (which you did not read, but commented on anyway).

"Google has actually removed pages from their search results - not because the pages were illegal or because the webmasters were search engine spamming, but because of the page's "offensive" content."
Another good reason to be in stealth is if a company is built around a technology or idea that it hopes to patent but has not yet filed.

I think this exception can be generalized to pure technology development, even without the patent legal requirement of non-disclosure. It applies if you are developing a new technology that already has a known market; or an entirely new technology (in which case you are more an inventor or scientist than an entrepreneur). So, Edison got his light-bulb working well enough; Birdseye discovered the freezing rate for fish that worked well enough.

Of course, most internet startups are not pure technology. They're mostly about market development, and at best, applying technology to that new market.

A final factor is that, even for pure technology, it helps if you can discuss it with someone. So it's good to have a team. This is one benefit of working in a big corp lab.
I actually like being forced (or forcing myself) to stop working. I've never regretted stopping work to go hang out with family or friends. I have regretted missing some fun life things because something had to be done. Almost always it turns out what I was working on could have easily waited.
The headline does not do the article justice.
Web development is a subset of "software engineering".

Computer science is not software engineering. It also is not a science and, arguably, is not really about computers.

Software engineering isn't really much of an engineering profession, for that matter.

Grumble.
I love comments in html code.

<!--
I assure you, we typically write nicer code than this.
This is git-it-done hacktown. -jr
-->
Download Google Talk
Wrapping Django ModelForm fields in custom template
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has solved the problem of embedding a series of pages inside of another (in the sense of Seaside) in a pure functional way. In other words, here's my challenge: write http://www.seaside.st/about/examples/multicounter using the same monadic style.
Stallman headlines this week's Boston Phoenix
http://arxiv.org/
Why I don't return your phone calls
Actually, when a person has touched lives of so many people in a very good and profound way, he cannot escape a bit of attention back. The enquiry "are you ok?" is human and not evil.
thanks, clscott. I will try it
The smartest guys give the illusion that they are very open. But that is only because they have so much to share, they can keep talking(without being boring) and yet not get to the stuff that can really hurt them. That has been my experience.

Make no mistake, even the biggest preachers of being open withheld information. I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion about what to share and what not to.
Why climatologists used the tree-ring data ‘trick’
The point is that it's impossible to tell what is Evil and what is Good. It entirely depends on your point of reference.

We release about 40% of Shopify's code base as open source. There are numerous knockoffs both closed source and open source that use all of our open source ( and even our themes, templates, js and css! ) to make competing products. This sucks for us and is certainly evil from our perspective but it's silly to change a battle hardened OSI license to prevent people from doing that.
What are they doing for a living ? Maybe I'm blind, but I cant find their product/service description, just a list of names that ring a bell, and vague marketing stuff written by a MBA.

Are they just selling hype or doing real stuff? Where can we see it ?
on third thought

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Things-Every-Developer-Should-Kno....

Post a status update and get the resulting status back as JSON: curl -u username:password -d status="your message here" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

what it doesn't tell you is that it sends the pw in the clear (unless you count base64 as crypto!)
Twitter search is now broken

"Older tweets are temporarily unavailable."

where older seems to be > 8 days
Lisp-like metaprogramming is really tricky

Whoa. That doesn't match my experience at all. I'd say it's simple and practically effortless (compared to what you'd have to do elsewhere). It would be surprising if it weren't, given that the whole language is organized around code=data.
Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout
Coming to the competition : http://uxoo.com
Now what? A feature race? Back to the problem of monetizing a website based on free software, where there is little to no entry bar.
When the website has too high a ratio of content to keywords. I know this from IM.
Saying that you're stealth is actually a great excuse to not have to spend half an hour yakking to people when you actually want to code.
Agreed. And unless you are building your own framework from scratch, most of the hard problems are already solved for you. That's not to say it is necessarily trivial (though it can certainly be), but it is not, say, researching new sort methods or creating new languages.

UPDATE: I suppose it could be argued that creating new languages is not computer science, either. I reckon it depends on the language itself.
It's certainly possible for a typed language like ML or Haskell to support metaprogramming. As other have noted, Haskell has Template Haskell. However, systems like MetaML and MetaOCaml support metaprogramming and give much stronger typing guarantees than Template Haskell. See http://www.metaocaml.org/examples/ for inspiration.
A large part of what constitutes lisp-style metaprogramming is macros, which are definitely a compile-time feature.
I use http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ and ACM digital library and sometimes google scholar
Skeptics are Antiseptics
While I think this can be great advice in the internet space, there's a pretty big difference between having a consumer product pre-vc funding which you can bootstrap to a release, and a biotech or cleantech based startup post-funding with roughly a dozen serious potential customers.
Ask HN: How to make VideoPress style video?
Hi

Video is good way for product promotion. Better than demo in my eye. My question is how to make video like http://videopress.com/? or how did you make video to promote your product.

Thanks
To provide some balance, does anyone here have any positive experiences with being in stealth mode?

I have one. We launched Twttr in a stealth private beta for at least a few months. I think the period coincided with the period it took to get an official SMS short code. During the stealth period we were serving SMS traffic out of an SMS modem attached to an office laptop. We got the normal benefit of polishing the product that you'd get from a private beta. Plus we got to develop the product without any public scrutiny. But we were very conservative about who we let know about the project, basically close friends and family who didn't work for a major internet company.

I think the hardest part about changing your product strategy is going back on your promises (in our case we'd promised customers, investors, and employees that we were going to build a world-changing podcast product). I don't know if it would have been fatal, but it definitely would have been uncomfortable to be accused of abandoning our initial product before knowing we had a success (and contrary to some statements, there were a big chunk of internal users who knew we had something important from the first day we used it).
My startup sim-releases xmas eBook w/custom video on web, & w/music on iPhone
Very nice work, and the code is clear and beautiful to a Haskell illiterate such as myself. But I have a problem. If your solution involves writing a library and importing it, have you really written a program with "only 13 nodes total"? If the answer is yes, then why can't I just put that program into a library, call it from a new program with only 1 or 2 nodes, and say "look at the size of this!"?

It's not obvious what counts as "the language" and what as "a library". Is printf part of C?

I suppose one could argue that if a library is general enough to make an entire class of programs shorter, as opposed to a few specific programs, then it gets to count as "the language". But that doesn't resolve the question so much as reword it.

Anyway, this is probably more of an objection to the original challenge than it is to this lovely Haskell code.
Ask HN: Image search API that allows automated querying?
I've been (unsuccessfully) looking for a service that will allow me to find images (specifically movie posters) via a web-based API, and that allows automated queries.

Some options I've already investigated:

Google, Yahoo, Bing, ALIPR: all of these services specifically ban queries of any sort unless they are specifically initiated (and editable) by an end-user.

Internet Video Archive: returns 'images' associated with a movie, but none of them are posters.

IMDB: Bans automated querying.
I'm interested in what turns up here, outside of arxiv - I have no clue, short of the odd self distributed paper.

I'm very much dependent on university journal subscriptions to get full text articles - mostly from sciencedirect. It's a shame, as it puts so much stuff out of reach if you're not in the same position.

I think in the CS and math fields arxiv can be very useful, but papers in my field (mostly CFD related) are fairly sparse.

It might be worth seeing if you can still get access from your university, even if you no longer attend or are affiliated/employed. I know mine offers library services to students after graduation (for life I think), which I assume includes access to journals.
Yeah that was my first thought after reading that cartoon.
They're not mutually exclusive, but very few astronomers grind their own lenses.
This explains my exact feelings about telephone conversations, except that I don't have a "phobia".

I just hate the telephone.

During a phone screen interview over a year ago, I told my future boss "yeah, this isn't going too well, I'm downstairs, I'll just come up."

Worked out for the best.
Neither of them, all of them. Small companies, such as startups, are more concerned about creation: the team is strictly small, and it's fast responsive. Big companies have more bureaucratic practices and processes, and no one wants responsibility, there's more talk than getting things done.

"Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
- Ambrose Bierce
The article's title itself poses a single question. But really, this article is about two separate, but related, issues:

1. Does a Web Developer benefit from as educational grounding in the Computer Sciences?
2. Are Web Developers (and by extension Software Engineers) by their very nature also Computer Scientists?

The first question is pretty straightforward to answer. Of course they do. The second one isn't so obvious, though. Furthermore, your interpretation of the "right" answer is going to be colored by your own educational background and experiences with others in the course of your respective academic/commercial career.
There are better ways to get away from people contacting him. Like, you know, actually telling people that you want to get away from them before shutting everything down.
I fall largely into the bucket of "if you can give away your idea in one sentence, then you're toast" but I personally break down my projects into three parts:

1. The idea itself in the way you'd present it to the layman

2. The engineering problems you face in implementing the idea

3. The solution to said problems

You can come off as being "open" by disclosing only the first part. If another person overhears (1) in your discussion, in order to implement the idea they first need to figure out (2) what makes it hard before even (3) devoting resources to solving the problem. And how you approach (2) and (3) in addition to just (1) is what determines success (read: execution). Note that I am making an assumption that whatever you're working on requires actual engineering.

So for the example of Google,

1) A search engine that lets you find stuff

2) Relevance is really freakin' hard

3) PageRank

None of this of course applies to negotiations with VCs, where the rules turn on their head and you don't want to make yourselves look like you are effortlessly delivering solutions. And unless you're looking for a certain type of leverage, acknowledging the fact that negotiations exist to other people is probably a bad idea too.
The trouble with this ubiquitous argument is that it is a cost-benefit argument that simply ignores one of the major costs, that of changing the design later. Yet that cost can easily be as high or higher than the cost of building the original system.

Treating this sort of design change as an optimization problem (i.e., we'll measure and fix the bottlenecks later) is a category error. There are many OO systems that simply can't be refactored to solve the problems the OP is talking about.

Does this turn out to matter? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Is there any way to measure it in advance? I doubt it. But that means there's no real cost-benefit argument here at all, only gut-feeling judgment and confirmation bias.
Take a dose of Snowcrash
Well put.

I gauge how much to share from person to person, or even town to town. I know being in a college town, I can get away with sharing a lot more, even down to the details because it is rare I am talking to someone who has the motivation or skill to even try to execute.

The same would not be true in Frisco where I know there are serious executors and I'd be a little more wary of the depth I go into.

I have this perspective because I am someone who regularly gets great ideas from listening to other folks talk. I am surprised by the depth they go into and as a consumer, welcome it! But if I were in their shoes, I am not sure I'd share the same information.

Having said all this, very few people anywhere will say that I am a secretive guy. I just try to be deliberate about what I share. I also believe in reciprocation, especially with numbers. And I am happy to lead.
The effect wasn't as strong as in the novel (luckily), but it was strangely relaxing to look at it while knowing it came from true randomness.
It seems like Amazon's "express checkout pay phrase" feature is focused on impulse buys, at sites other than Amazon. It's really the next, more secure step, after one-click, for enabling easy payments on sites other than Amazon.

Too bad the idea of amazon's implementation of payphrase kind of feels goofy.
Because otherwise people would have realized much earlier that their tree-ring data is not a useful proxy for temperature?
This was an awesome post, thanks. 48% from Google = 250,000 views from Google SEO alone? That's pretty cool.
The thing I hate about phonecalls is that they are so disruptive.

If I'm in the middle of something, I can either take the call or ignore it, but either way I've probably ended up being distracted. At least with IM or email, I can defer my response until I've finished what I'm doing, even if it's just finishing that sentence I was on. Yes, I could call the person back, but then I just end up putting them in the same position that I was in 5 minutes earlier.
If I create syntax with a program (code with code) is that metaprogramming? Doesn't c++ or any text generating code already do this?

Maybe it's not "native" and I have to run system level calls to force compiles and execution of created code.

Almost all programs do metaprogramming (interpreted code, scala on the jvm, etc).

What's the differentiatior for Lisps Metaprogramming (self contained languange structures?).

I'm pretty interested in simplification of programmer interfaces on iteratively more functional (but perhaps more complex) underbellies. I will certainly investigate.
Ask HN: Any of you summarize lectures with a laptop?
Hello.

I'm a student which try to summarize the course material in my laptop live during class.

I've already found many solutions to entering math formulas quickly. However, I have not found any good solution to enter simple and common graphics (at least in Computer Science). (Such as graphs, timelines, etc.)

Do you have any recommendations? As for now, I simply do not copy any graphical representation.

If nobody will find anything, it could be a fantastic mini application or office plugin to develop.
All I want is a language which can tap directly in to my imagination and rapidly create machine functionality and simulations.
Other than an academic exercises I have never had to write a sort in any language I have used. But know what does involve computer science, knowing what type of pre-written sort to apply to your problem based on time and memory constraints. Or knowing the performance characteristics of different key/value stores on a specific data set.

Saying web development is just construction is crazy. Maybe for some brochure-ware sites it is, but not for ebay, amazon, google, etc.. It is like saying building a sky scraper is just construction, just like building a dog house.
Another thing worth remembering in this context is that once people get used to lying with a straight face it is a hell of a job to stop.